A Review

I didn’t mean to watch The Royle Family. I’d got in just before 9 and switched the TV on but hadn’t bothered to change channels as I had a washing machine to fill.
But when it started I was partly intrigued. I’d heard that Caroline Aherne had gone a bit “curly-wurly cuckoo”, so I watched the first couple of minutes wondering if there would be any outward sign of this. I don’t know what I was expecting; Aherne in a straight-jacket with mad eyes staring through the soul of anyone who’d tuned in? Maybe.
It quickly became apparent though that I was witnessing something special. A televisual event was occurring in front of my very eyes, something that demanded that I watched the entire episode so I wouldn’t feel left out. It was the same feeling that made me watch Princess Diana’s funeral even though I felt nothing but ambivalence over her death. I had to waste an hour of my life on this programme, just so I could join in any conversations about it at work the next day. Because there would be conversations wouldn’t there? Wherever people met up they’d talk about the one-off Royle Family special.
And what would they talk about around their water coolers and their dinner tables? They’d talk about this jaw-dropping display of mawkishness, this semi-patronising shit about working-class northerners and this fucking aberration of a programme that sacrificed plotting, characterisation and humour for blatant attempts to elicit tears from viewers.
If they wanted tears then they should have come round to my house, put grated onion in my eyes and let a hungry gerbil nibble on my bellend. That would have got the tears they wanted and the whole experience would have been far less painful.
The whole episode was set up with one event in mind and you didn’t have to be Stevie Hawking to deduce that the Nan of the family would die at the end. So there was little in the way of any story, and far too many characters. All of them were crowded in to take their turns to have a poignant moment with the befuddled old-timer. Knowing that this was a one-off, the writers (fucking three of them!) didn’t bother developing the characters, but merely trotted out the most established feature of each of the characters in turn, like some sort of fucking greatest hits collection. Ha ha ha, I’m fat! Ho de ho, I’m a grumpy bastard! Hee tiddly hee, I’m stupid! Me too! Well, I’m old and stupid!
It was manipulative and so lazily written. Writers Aherne, Cash and Mr. Nobody obviously wanted to move their audience to tears, to make them sad to see the loss affecting these characters. But there are several problems with this:

1. The characters are largely dislikeable. The dad of the family is obviously a bit of a cunt. The writers are trying to imply that he has a heart of gold and that he loves his family deep down, but all the set-pieces depict him as being largely unpleasant to them all. We see him cry as the Nan dies but surely the thought that should flick into your mind at this is “well, why didn’t you treat her better then you cunt”.
2. The characters are all so one-dimensional. As I said before, all the characters were wheeled on for just the one purpose, to give their signature catchphrase or to do what they were remembered for, and then to fuck off.
3. This “loving” look at a northern working-class family is actually a sneery and condescendingly stereotypical view of the sort of family I grew up in. This “harsh but fair, lazy but loveable” standpoint is something I’d expect off a posh writer who’d read too many Catherine Cookson books, the fact that it is written by people who apparently grew up in this sort of environment is laughable. Aren’t these northerners quaint? They live in slums and don’t wash but they love their extended family. Yeah, they’re bigots, they don’t work and are suspicious of anyone different than them but THEY LOVE THEIR FUCKING FAMILY! What can be read from the writing is that working-class people have no desire for any intellectual pursuits (indeed, this should actually be feared) and that their only interests are money, drink and the TV. And that is just bollocks.

That the lazily written characterisation wasn’t the worst thing about the programme sums up the whole venture. There were a couple of other things which stuck in the craw more however.
I’ve touched on the staggeringly heavy-handed approach in trying to wring emotion from the viewers, but it’s hard to put into words how mawkish and trite the programme was. The writers obviously lacked the skill to show the death of a beloved family member in a subtle and genuinely emotional way so abandoned this in favour of cliché and the oh-so-fucking-obvious. So Nan told everyone how much she loved them and about how she wanted to live just long enough to see her next great-grandchild. That they dragged her death out - complete with dogshit-desperate ultra-poignant directorial work and a boo-fucking-hoo sad song draped over the top - leads me to what was the biggest crime of all.
It wasn’t funny.
Unable to drag themselves away from their attempts to become the Mawkmeister Generals, the writers forgot to put any jokes in. Instead they were forced into musical set-pieces, execrable sequences in which the family danced and pricked about. Look at the northerners dance like monkeys! Look at them laugh at dad using a zimmer frame!
Almost 8 million people watched this syrupy unfunny shit. All I hope is that most of them were sat in horror like me, unable to believe that nobody threw the script into a burning bin before filming even started. If a 10 year old kid handed this in as an English assignment he’d get an F.