Catastrophe review: Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan are utterly at home together
It is very difficult indeed to make an entertaining sitcom where nothing much happens. Relief all round, then, that Catastrophe (Channel 4), returning for its fourth and final series, manages to wring as much vicarious pleasure as it does from the various miseries of Rob (Rob Delaney) and Sharon (Sharon Horgan), who write and star in this definitively sardonic exploration of modern professional middle-class, early-middle-aged life.
I suppose you could think of Catastrophe as an updated Terry and June, with added alcoholism, shoplifting, drug abuse and doggy-style sex scenes. Got that image in your head? Is it going to be difficult to expunge? Good. Anyway, quite a promising blend, you’ll agree.
We find Rob where we left off, “a criminal in a neck brace”, recovering from a drink-driving incident in which he suffered mild whiplash and severe humiliation. He has been sentenced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, and no less than 215 weekends of community service, which he spends selling incomplete chess sets and doilies in a cerebral palsy charity shop. He has been banned from driving, understandably. He soon settles in, though, in his uncompromisingly dry way, as in this exchange with one of his old lady volunteer co-workers:
Old lady volunteer: “I have cerebral palsy.”
Rob: “People with cerebral palsy can do anything.”
Old lady volunteer: “I can’t drive.”
Rob: “Neither can I.”
Political correctness and irony make for difficult partners, as many a comic has discovered on social media, but, as here, they can just about rub along, provided there is understanding on both sides. Plus a whole lot of wit.
Sharon’s problem is that she has become a kleptomaniac. Mind you, I would also be tempted to switch the price tags if I was asked to pay £32 for a triceratops pillow cover. But she finds herself plumbing fresh depths when she tries to impose her own unofficial discount of £150 off a pair of designer jeans: “I’ve been caught stealing like a meth head”.
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The comfortable suburban proceedings are, though, given rather more of a phantasmagorical shock with the intervention of Amanda, a seemingly run-of-the-mill alcoholic Rob meets at his AA session. Amanda is played with a rare, rich eccentricity by Julie Hesmondhalgh, who is unsurpassed in the field of rare, rich eccentricity – like the fruitiest, nuttiest fruitcake you ever did taste, with a fruity chutney of a Lancashire accent to match.
At first sight, she is just another pitiable woman at an AA meeting who lost her husband in a house fire caused by her falling into a drunken stupor and knocking over a candle. (“Was he cooked or was it smoke inhalation?” Sharon later enquires.) At second sight, she becomes a stalker, pursuing Rob with an incongruously homely sort of passion. But at third sight, when Rob pops round to drop off the missing bishops (from the chess set), he discovers that her husband is still alive, and that she is a fantasist, and possibly not even an alcoholic at all. It is ridiculous, but our Julie’s performance, and Horgan-Delaney’s scripting, somehow makes you forget how silly it all is.
Like the late Terry Scott and June Whitfield, who we’ve rightly heard so much about lately, Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan seem so much at home together – albeit with that lively sarcastic edginess – that you’d almost believe they are a couple in real life. It’s all quite plausible when Rob snaps back at Sharon that “I’m not a secret alcoholic. I told you that the night we met.”
But they’re not. The relationship is professional, and what a shame that this will be the last run for Catastrophe. I hope there will be new projects, and that Rob and Sharon don’t get divorced, artistically speaking.
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