TV review: Him & Her | My Family's Crazy Gap Year

Published on Monday 6 September 2010 16:35

Him & Her BBC3 My Family's Crazy Gap Year Channel 4

It's entertaining to speculate on what an American remake of Him & Her, should it ever come to pass, would be like. The twentysomething couple would be gorgeous - not that there's anything wrong with Russell Tovey or Sarah Solemani, but they'd be replaced with buffed, polished perfection. They wouldn't be on the dole, they'd have vaguely glamorous jobs which don't require them to ever do anything but pay enough for a stunning apartment, not a messy bedsit where spiders crawl around cups of half-drunk cold tea.

There would be no mention of drugs and only mild innuendo replacing open talk about sex. Above all, there would never be any mention of the toilet, let alone a scene of anyone sitting on it with the door open.

In fact, there wouldn't be much left and so it's unlikely that Him & Her ever will be translated overseas. It's very British, very BBC3, but, with a script by Stefan Golaszewski (part of the sketch group Cowards), despite the crude references it would be inaccurate to class it alongside the shagging'n'farting obsessed likes of Two Pints Of Lager. Determinedly plot free, set entirely in the flat where Tovey's Steve (Him) and Solemani's Becky (Her) lie about in their pants, the show has definite ambitions to portray something a bit different. I'm just not quite sure what.

The couple are young and in love - well, in lust, anyway. He wants to have sex, a lot. She is amenable, as long as it doesn't clash with Cash In The Attic, but not above bribing him with it to let her whining sister come round. As they cheerfully argue over not flushing their poo and moan about who's making the toast, it is not a relationship with a lot of mystery, unless you count the fact that he knows her sister's boyfriend has cheated on her with a Sporty Spice lookalike, but Becky quickly worked that one out anyway. "Sporty Spice!" wept the aggrieved sister. "I never liked her!" "There was that one she did with Bryan Adams," pointed out Becky reasonably, before quickly recanting after an outraged look. "No, no, never liked her."

The only drama, if you can call it that, involved a feeble attempt to capture a spider, ultimately beyond their energy. Self-absorbed, annoying and lewd, they are the epitome of directionless, lazy youth that grumpy old people like to moan about. They're also quite happy.

There are no jokes. It will be hated by many as a pointless non-story about irritating people.Which it is, but it might develop over the series into something quite interesting, if they can scale back on the jobby jokes and really capture that intense time when there are so many possibilities ahead that the most appealing one is to do nothing.

The Willmott children will probably be desperate to do just that after their relentlessly hippier-than-thou mum Rafia frogmarched them and husband John away from their privileged Home Counties life to live with a series of tribespeople in remote rainforests in My Family's Crazy Gap Year. The three kids were remarkably patient about being bitten by mosquitoes, risking malaria (Rafia doesn't believe in vaccinations) and learning how to slaughter yaks. But in five years' time, they'll probably be the most materialistic, strait-laced teenagers possible, just to rebel.