Reviews

Agriculture may be in steep decline, but in gastronomic terms and in our TV viewing habits we’re all grazers now.

Instead of sitting down to family meals, we raid the fridge for snacks - whatever happened to those specially designed TV dinners? and then return to the sofa to play restlessly with the remote control.

Film and beef producers alike have failed to catch up with the trend. Just as few of us now gather round the table to share the evening meal, so not everyone follows every episode of a particular series. Like farm animals or the great herds of antelope in all those nature programmes, we’re grazing.

Most running series, therefore, start each episode with a little resume of the past in an attempt to convey something of the drift of the story. But when you get dramas that are heavily textured, with many characters and complicated plot lines, this doesn’t really work.

I’d defy anyone to feel completely at home, for example, if, without having seen it before, they suddenly came across the snippets at the start of last night’s chapter of Cold Feet, Mike Bullen’s superb comedy of modern manners, or Saturday’s Roger Roger, which has a deceptively simple setting in a minicab firm, but branches out in lots of different directions from there.

Roger Roger, however, does have one additional factor that helps to grab the attention of the occasional or chance viewer.

Its author, John Sullivan, writes wonderful set-piece comedy scenes that are often only incidental to the main story, and these can be enjoyed however unfamiliar you may be with a show now five episodes into its second series.

There were several such scenes on Saturday. The best, to my mind, was the double act put on by a pair of waiters in an Asian restaurant where two of the tables were occupied by mainline characters pushing the plot along.

At one was the naive, would-be rock star, Phil (Philip Glenister), dining with his estranged wife, Chrissie (Helen Grace), on the advice of Sam (Robert Daws), his boss at Cresta Cabs.

‘Women love dinners,’ Sam told him. ‘It’s not the thought of filling their faces with vine leaves and couscous or knocking back the bottle of wine they find inviting.

‘It’s the restaurant, because it’s public and the woman knows there’ll be no rows, no screaming, no frets, no recriminations, but a civilised discussion.’ All of which goes to show, I would have thought, recalling painful experiences of my own and others, the exceedingly poor standard of Sam’s advice.

SAM himself sat at another table with Helen Jackson (Pippa Haywood), manager of a health farm, from whom he has just secured a contract because she has fallen for him. To encourage her ardour, Sam, as usual, has told several lies, including the assertion that, like her, he does not drink.

Enter the Pakistani waiters, one with a grievance against Cresta Cabs because a driver collided with his car even though it was standing in his front drive. So, by way of revenge, he teases Sam by showing undue familiarity and offering him a complimentary whisky and soda.

When the drink is refused, the waiter, in broken English, prattles on about his cousin in Lahore who is also ‘an alcoholic person’.

When Sam is about to pay the bill, the waiter chides him for having left some food. ‘My eyes were bigger than my belly,’ he explains, at which both waiters in singsong voices, and occasionally breaking into Urdu, embarrassingly assure him that he has beautiful eyes and a lovely belly.

As soon as he leaves, both revert to Cockney. ‘That’ll teach him to let one of his drivers back into my car,’ said one. ‘Get the door, Reg, that’s enough for the night. ‘Ere, do us a Canadian Club and American, no ice.’

‘Right you are,’ said the other.

‘Sorted, my son.’ Beautifully acted scenes like this are rewarding to watch however unfamiliar you may be with the series itself. In fact, encountering them unawares may be the best justification for station hopping.

Best or noisiest first, I wonder? Better make it best, I suppose, or everybody will go around behaving like Jeremy Clarkson and that would never do. So, best: which last night turned out to be Roger Roger (BBC1), the new comedy from John Sullivan of Only Fools and Baftas fame.

There was a pilot episode for this last year, which as far I can remember was slightly disappointing and numbered Neil Morrissey among its ambitiously large cast. The series proper turned out to be much better and did not include Morrissey, although I stress the two things are not related.

So who is in it, then? Well, Robert Daws for a start, doing all the neurotic, pedantic, ineffective stuff that he does so well. Ditto, Keith Allen, who plays Dexter, the co-owner of Cresta Cabs. He’s all menace and curled lip, so sneer-perfect that if an intimate rings up to tell me that Allen glowers in his sleep, I shan’t be the slightest bit surprised. So far, it’s a triumph for casting.

But it’s also a triumph for Sullivan, who seems to have learnt from the somewhat two-dimensional pilot. In almost every case (and we didn’t meet the whole cast in last night’s opening episode) he’s made the character just a little bit more interesting than they would need to be for your standard sitcom. Sam (Daws) is neurotic, pedantic and ineffective, but he’s also in love with Reen (Pippa Guard), Cresta’s right-hand woman. Two problems - one, she’s married and two, Sam accidentally revealed his affections to Cresta’s entire cab fleet after some faulty new radio equipment had been installed. It was an old joke but beautifully done.

Similarly, there is more to Dexter than we might imagine. His bimbo wife, Tina, may be a “cheerleader for Stupid United”, as Sam put it, but her infidelity with an insurance salesman drove her husband to a breakdown.

They had just returned from Barbados, where they had been to repair their marriage and accidentally stir up a little racial tension. “I’d hardly call slavery ‘hard work’,” interrupted Sam, as Tina recalled how she told a local waiter how lucky he was to be working in beautiful Barbados rather than somewhere awful in Africa. “Don’t be stupid, Sam,” replied Dexter, springing improbably to his wife’s defence: “It was bloody hard work.”

With Philip Glenister (taking over from Morrissey) and Helen Grace contributing enjoyably to a subplot that could have been called “sex ‘n’ cabs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll”, it was an impressive start. The humour is probably too understated for it to be a popular hit on the scale of Only Fools and the pace just a little on the slow side, but it’s quality stuff that refreshingly seems to have been written for everyone, rather than the lads staggering back from the pub.