How Not Going Out’s heroes went from cat-fight chemistry to child-saddled losers

With the intrigue deflated, Lee Mack’s comedy couldn’t sustain itself on average jokes aloneChannel surfing was a bleak prospect back in 2006. With every click of the TV remote came another bombshell from a world on the brink. Nuclear standoffs. Poisoned spies. Hannah Montana. If only there were a sitcom to sweeten these dark and dystopian times, we thought. A frothy half-hour hug, with jokes that your dad might have read off a lolly stick in Weston-super-Mare circa 1979. A show with the irony-free exuberance of a Butlin’s Redcoat performing The Birdie Song.Not Going Out was that show, and with Colour Me Mindful books yet to be invented, we fell on it like needy burnouts. By series two, the setup was firmly in place and so simple even a goldfish would get it: each week, feckless man-child Lee (Lee Mack) would sniff around his imperious flatmate Lucy (Sally Bretton) and watch his worst-laid romantic plans go up in smoke. Granted, Not Going Out was only marginally more sophisticated than Noel Edmonds’s gunge tank. However, like My Family before it, Mack and Andrew Collins’s script was irresistible comfort food, suspending the horrors of the world and keeping audiences hooked with the odd couple’s catfight chemistry – and the occasional zinger. Continue reading…
Via: How Not Going Out’s heroes went from cat-fight chemistry to child-saddled losers