H ow do you make the old-school sitcom – with its improbable plotlines, cartoonish characters and gimmicky setting – feel fresh and relevant in 21st-century Britain? Apparently, the answer is to shun the modern world altogether. Following the devout Lewis family, Everyone Else Burns pitches up in a Manchester-based evangelical church (and doomsday cult) where misogyny, homophobia and a shockingly dated sense of community are all alive and well. It’s deliberately unrelatable material presented in doggedly artificial, stupid hairdo-heavy style.
As a contemporary comedy it shouldn’t work, but – by God – it really does. The brilliance of Everyone Else Burns – now returning for a second series – is partly the result of a script thick with quirky jokes, but mainly down to a cast who are simply a joy to behold. As pathologically incompetent patriarch David, The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird somehow walks the line between heinously oppressive and heart-rendingly naive: a devotee of his sect’s misogynistic creed, he has zero qualms about being a dinner table despot, yet his unworldliness (he believes that gazing upon the Sun-Maid girl constitutes marital infidelity) and Bird’s utterly un-alpha energy mean he’s more fool than tyrant.
Everyone else excels, too: Kate O’Flynn is supremely awkward as David’s shudderingly repressed trad wife, Fiona, who is continually led astray by naughty neighbour Melissa (the great Morgana Robinson). Funny Woman’s Arsher Ali turn.