Stath Lets Flats, series 3 review: powerful without being political and rip-roaringly funny
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, to put it another way – if a sitcom wins three Baftas, and no one watches it, is it a comedy classic? In the case of Stath Lets Flats (Channel 4), Jamie Demetriou’s oddball sitcom about an inept Greek-Cypriot lettings agent in north London, undoubtedly so.
Perhaps it doesn’t pull in the viewing figures because people write it off as jolly slapstick or awkward cringe comedy or zany pratfalls or crude clowning. Think that, however, and Demetriou has sucker punched you all. It’s the most cerebral, emotional and subtle comedy on TV.
Now, yes, I must admit that the first joke in the third series – and the first of many, many belly laughs – is Stath forgetting the name “Bernard” and coming up with “Gernold”, and the central gag throughout is that everyone in the show is some shade of stupid, but Stath Lets Flats trounces the competition by the sheer fact that it has the guts to be a comedy. Not a comedy-drama. Not a first-person confessional diatribe. Not a thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-piece. A comedy.
The vogue in TV comedy at the moment, of course, is for thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-pieces. Edinburgh Fringe shows inflated to six 30-minute episodes. Did the Fringe show only have six decent jokes? No problem, one per episode, that’ll do nicely. Fleabag, Chewing Gum, This Way Up et al deserve their plaudits, but there is something determinedly route one about them. Their protagonist splurges all at the screen. You’re left in no doubt about the show’s themes and message. You’re left in no doubt about the writer’s history. It’s warts-and-all with a prurient lingering on the warts. And, yes, those sort of warts.
Stath Lets Flats – a sitcom about an idiotic manchild who fits somewhere snugly between Mr Bean, Frank Spencer and Basil Fawlty – has what most modern comedies (or comedy-dramas) dare not: subtext. Since the beginning of series one, Stath, who was born in Cyprus and moved to London when he was eight, has been desperate to be a man. A real man. A real Greek-Cypriot man. Desperate to prove to his alpha-male father, with his cardigan-wearing, roll-up smoking alpha male friends, that he is a provider, a hunter-gatherer, a man. Stath, however, is as soft as butter. He is a lamb in a field of bulls.
As this series begins, he is about to achieve his most sought-after goal – to become a father. He tells Gernold – sorry, Bernard – that he wants to pass the family business onto his son. No matter that the family business is saddled with debt and now being run out of his father’s kitchen after the man his father sold the business to died, no matter that the child’s mother wants as little to do with him as possible, no matter than he doesn’t even know he is having a son. He is passing the family business over to his son.
The portrait painted of the Greek-Cypriot community in north London, and the second generation who desperately want to embrace their fathers' culture while struggling to understand it, is exquisitely painted. Just what happens when a lamb wants to run with the bulls?
Series three suffers, as anything does, as Succession is doing, with a little bit of familiarity fatigue. The cast is exceptional, but we know their rhythms now – Al (Alistair Roberts) is dementedly deferent, Carole (Katy Wix) is psychopathically independent, Sophia (Natasia Demetrious, Jamie’s sister) is sweetly insane, Dean (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) despairs of them all – and the occasional skit loses its impact. Sophia and Katia (Ellie White) moving into awful home-made movies, rather than awful home-made pop music, for instance, feels like the same joke, told again, told worse.
However, any doubts that the series would not live up to its predecessors is dispelled in the second episode, when This Country’s Charlie Cooper turns up as a rival lettings agent and he and Demetriou engage in a bit of physical comedy that should live down the ages – a fight in which neither man lands a blow, but both men, and the flat they’re in, end up battered.
Demetriou doesn’t stare down the camera and tell you about the sharp edges of the second-generation immigrant experience in modern Britain or how tough it can be to be a man who cannot live up to his father. But pratfall by pratfall, malapropism by malapropism, belly laugh by belly laugh, Stath stealthily, subtly coaxes us into an understanding of his world. Oh and it does comedy better than anyone. “What is a Scottish egg?” Stath, incredulous, asks a shopkeeper. In the next scene, as he berates a different shopkeeper, Stath is eating a Scotch egg. Sublime.
