Lee Mack Interview

Sitcom writer and stand-up Lee Mack tells The Independent the secrets of being funny on TV.

Although everyone gets his or her own punch lines, Lee responds to almost everything with a joke - we're meant to see it as a half-charming character defect - and so there's one every few lines when he's around. That relentlessness is eventually funny in itself - it's the Henny Youngman Effect, it wears you down. The pace is rapid and the tone is dry, and the rhythms and melodies of the jokes are particularly English and at times seem to jump back 50 years to the days of Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne.

Despite the slightly serialised element hovering over the relationships, the show mostly relies on Mack's rapid delivery of jokes, which would be more palatable if the other characters didn't persistently question his subconscious motivations in using humour to hide his feelings. There's nothing like constantly being reminded you're watching a sitcom to undermine caring at all about the modest plots.

Although slacker comedy represents a well-worn staple, that conceit takes on a rather strange quality when said slacker passes the age of 25. At a certain point, Lee seems less like an unpredictable free spirit than that annoying guy sleeping on Kate's couch and unsettling the neighbors.

The show has a setup as simple and streamlined as a US sitcom. That's one of its charms, that it takes a US format, Anglicises it with quirky little grace notes and sells it back to us. In fact, Not Going Out has the feel of a British show destined to be Americanised, like the successful The Office or the flop Coupling.

This is exactly what sitcoms should be all about. Funny, edgy, uncompromising and ultimately the right kind of distraction. These Brits truly know how to make anything sound and look funny so we know that this show can do very well here in the US. A must-watch!

Lee Mack Interview

An interview with Lee Mack

The writing is sharp and clever, if a little self-indulgent: the inclusion of three zany elements (depressive author, Lee's job packing Christmas crackers, and circus skills class) in a single episode seemed to me to be trying a bit hard, when the core of the comedy has to be the interplay between Lee, Kate and Tim.

Unfortunately some of the best lines were lost; Lee's delivery was so fast that he didn't give them space to breathe, and the audience's early laughter often swamped the killer line.

A more serious problem is the location: whatever one may say about Men Behaving Badly, Extras, or even Two Pints of Lager, they all have a distinctive locale, a real place where these characters and their relatives live. In contrast, Not Going Out is set in a vague generic city, the same city as Coupling, with an anonymous flat, anonymous bar, anonymous office, and characters with no history.