Hunderby: why this Julia Davis comedy is worth watching

This period-sitcom homage to Daphne du Maurier is the most original show on television. If you didn't catch Hunderby first time round, don't miss the repeat.

Steve Coogan makes a suitably un-avuncular narrator in this nightmare-before-Christmas tale for older animation fans with a taste for something darker, as spouses Julian Barratt and Julia Davis supply voices. What to buy a boy who has everything? A giant crab, of course.

Joel Veitch - he of the dancing internet cats - writes, and Steve Coogan, Julia Davis and Julian Barratt star in this wonky animated tale of greying Uncle Wormsley and young, wealthy Johnny Goodington. Johnny wants a giant crab for Christmas, but the only person who has one is Wormsley. The boy's parents decide to call in The Crab Catchers to guarantee their precious boy his wish. But at what price? A skewwhiff morality tale that calls to mind Warp Films' superb Bunny and the Bull in tone, this is a weird, exciting half-hour break from the norm.

An earlier slot might have been more suitable for this rudimentary animated children's fable. It's a gruesome, cautionary tale about love, greed and a giant crab, written by Tim Gallagher and Joel Veitch, and produced by Baby Cow. Steve Coogan narrates the story of a miserably creepy, grey old man, Uncle Wormsley, whose sole companion is a huge crab that he keeps in a cage and to whom he feeds the neighbours' pets. Across town lives the spoilt Johnnie, whose parents are obscenely wealthy and who is given everything he wants. But the one thing he craves is a giant crab and so his father enters into a devilish pact with the mysterious "crab-catchers". Julian Barratt, John Thomson and Julia Davis provide the voices.

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Julia Davis: British TV comedy needs variety

Julia Davis talks to Metro about her new period drama-inspired comedy Hunderby and the state of British TV comedy.

Hunderby, DVD review

Julia Davis's Hunderby is beautifully odd, deliciously dark, and played absolutely straight, writes Rachel Ward.

Last in the exquisitely funny series. Helene is confined to the attic until her pelvic explosion cometh, while Doctor Foggarty, wretched with drink, tries to make another go of it with Crippled Hester. Julia Davis and co-writer Barunka O'Shaughnessy must take several bows to deafening applause for this comic masterpiece. The hoot-per-minute rate has remained high throughout and among an exemplary cast, Alex MacQueen (as Edmund) did a full Sheryl Crow, moving from comedy backing singer to lead vocals with aplomb.

Interview: Julia Davis

She's been responsible for some of British television's blackest and most brilliant comedy. But Stylist discovers Julia Davis is a sensitive soul at heart...

Of all the mysteries in Julia Davis's latest series, Hunderby, perhaps none can trump that surrounding its revered creator.

How, interviewers have repeatedly wondered, can the reserved, self-deprecating woman in front of them be the same one responsible for some of the most disturbing TV comedy of the last decade? Chiefly Nighty Night, the sadistic sick-com which saw a deranged suburbanite breaking up marriages, poisoning priests, and inseminating herself with semen-spattered pie and mash. And then Lizzie and Sarah, a 2010 pilot about two abused wives whose wet-weekend-in-Dungeness levels of bleakness convinced the BBC to schedule it in the treasured time-slot prefacing late-night Ceefax.

Well, the plot only thickens with, Hunderby, which is less overtly shocking than those previous works but just as bizarre: a Gothic burlesque both finely mounted and fetidly imagined. Set in "the year of the Lord 1831", as the sonorous narration has it, it tells the story of a shipwrecked, amnesiac ingénue (Alexandra Roach) who washes up in an English coastal village and falls into marriage with its widowed pastor, Edmund. But her real misfortune is to have been cast into a particularly demented riff on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, complete with devious housekeeper Dorothy, played by Davis herself, gruesome meal options, and endless servings of verbal and physical humiliation. "I take much comfort from your simplicity ... both of looks and character," Roach's hubby-to-be tells her early on, getting things off to a deliciously inauspicious start.

The script, needless to say, is one, long zinger, parodying high-falutin' costume-drama diction with an exquisite mixture of savagery and scatology. I loved Edmund's excruciating comparison of his first and second wives' pudenda: "Arabelle was smooth as ham - nature did not busy her broken mound with such a black and forceful brush". And Dorothy's sombre update on her master's mother's medical condition: "Her bowel has still not spoken, Sir ... though I fancy I caught a whisper." I could go on - and certainly will outside this column, so watch out friends, colleagues and quote-haters! - with countless other lines, whose surreal artistry you wanted to roll over your tongue and savour. Meanwhile Nighty Night fans will know what I mean when I say that the phrase "bubbly milk" could well become the new "Hiya Kath!"

But will the series have the impact of that cult favourite? Probably not - for all its perverse imagination, the tone is more muted, the humour less obvious and the literary conceit possibly more limiting. Though what chance it has rests with Davis's fabulously callous Dorothy; with her Medusa-like stare and simmering sexual pathology, she makes Mrs Danvers look like Mrs Doubtfire.