Telly Talk: Magic moments

Caroline Aherne’s name is a bit of a buzzword with regards to telly programmes. Everyone remembers the Mrs Merton shows, there’s a warm glow in countless hearts at the propsect of another The Royle Family special, but her last original venture – The Fattest Man In Britain – seemed to pass a number of us by. Back with a new series, rather than the one-off TV movie venture, Fattest Man… was but continuing with the writing partnership that spawned, we present to you The Security Men.

An hour long, this isn’t your typical sitcom, but then you wouldn’t expect it to be accompanied by a laughter track. Utilising Aherne’s writing strengths, the beauty in this is in the details. It’s essentailly about four men patrolling a shopping centre overnight, every night, and their dynamic that takes you back to the school yard of silliness and juvenile privacy. As two of them demonstrate a rather graceful ballet between two mobility scooters using the edges of the peripheral vision of the security cameras as the wings of their stage, there’s an affectionate silliness with filling time that Aherne has demonstrated so well in previous projects.

“People are sweet and so is their behaviour, whether they’re five or 50”

It’s the secret corners unseen by the rest of the world, unnoticed, but now revealed to be full of mischief and larks. It’s the world of the night watchmen, with the long-suffering elder statesman jobsworth Kenneth bringing elements of pathos, gravitas and sweet authority to the dingbat ensemble.

People are sweet and so is their behaviour, whether they’re five or 50. Human behaviour is the star, the incidents only the catalyst to show it off at its sparkly kookiness. And not like Zooey Deschanel ‘kooky’. My only real problem with this programme is, surprisingly, the plot. There shouldn’t be one. Maybe Aherne has lost confidence in the fine crafting of her characters, maybe she’s gotten bored with them doing very little, or maybe her writing partner (Jeff Pope, whose work also includes the Sheridan Smith vehicle for telly Mrs Biggs) needs to have more story to get his writing teeth stuck into. Whatever it is, it’s unnecessary. I’d much rather hear more about Ducker (Bobby Ball’s) missus Linda, whose escapades off screen threaten to leave Arthur Daley’s ‘Her Indoors’ in the dust in the race to claim the off-screen queen tiara.

Indelicate language, fabulous human flaws, casual duplicity, and an enforced group dynamic of silly waggers all work well. Once you’ve got that, who really needs a reason to get in a flap too – beyond messing up a biscuit rota? Oh, and the soundtrack is quite cracking too to any film and TV buff. Lush stuff.

The Security Men, BBC1, Friday 12 April 2013