Flowers

From a weird reverie of dark revelation,

Mr Grubb woke up with a strange sensation.

Slipping out through the crack at the back of the lair,

Trudging out through the muck and the thick misted air,

Where the collywobbles cawed their sinister call

And the dingle-baggles scurried on jittery claws.

His ghostly breath mixing in with the fog;

He plonked himself down on a damp, mossy log.

But then in the sludge,

Just a few feet away,

Mr Grubb saw a plant that was quite out of place;

A single buttercup in a pile of faeces.

Mr Grubb tore it up into a pile of pieces.

This piece of verse is the prelude to Will Sharpe’s sitcom, Flowers. Fittingly, the poem is read as depressed lead character Maurice Flowers attempts to hang himself in the garden. However, his flight to death is grounded when the rope snaps, leading him to collapse into a cry of invective. He must live another Groundhog Day of suffocating misery.

Maurice is a celebrated children’s author, famous for his series of books titled ‘Grubbs.’ His characters and landscapes are as dark as his own internal world. Look again at the above dark rhyme and you’ll see that Grubb doesn’t preserve the buttercup of beauty but destroys it by dismembering it. At this stage in Maurice's life he can’t see the buttercup from the faeces: buried under a landslide of shit, he can source no salvation. All of this nihilism has a huge impact on his family.

Julian Barratt as lugubrious Maurice.

His wife Deborah, a music teacher, is a wreck of nerves, seeking the recognition that her husband’s condition denies. Fearful her sexuality is wilting under neglect, she flirts appallingly -in both senses of the word- with the local builders. The children Amy and Donald are also scarred from their parents marital strife, represented by their self-imposed isolation: Amy takes artistic residence in the upstairs bedroom, devising love songs and poems; whereas Donald turns the basement into a dragon’s den, engineering inventions that are more an exhibition of poor workmanship than entrepreneurship. The times the 25-year-old siblings do meet in the middle, in the living room, is disastrous with them fighting like squabbling toddlers. For a family whose jobs and pastimes involve creation, they seem totally hell-bent on destroying one another. In their quaint bucolic home, paradise has well and truly been lost. Can it be rediscovered? Does anyone even have the will to find it?

The ‘sitcom’ then is a sobering portrait of mental illness: what it can do to the victim and, just as important, what it can do to the family. With depression, no man is an island: when his city is taken, the whole country succumbs too. Julian Barratt imbues in Maurice the thousand-yard-stare of a man who has been fighting a war of the mind, and now wants to raise a white flag in surrender; but more powerful is the strained-eyed vivacity of Colman’s Deborah, whom is desperately trying to claw him from the precipice. 

Colman desperately trying to keep it together as Deborah.

For all my talk on the mental health issues explored in Flowers, it is worth highlighting the terrific humour on show. The black backdrop of depression looms heavily over the stage, but in front of it hilarious incidents play out. Shun, played by writer-director Will Sharpe, is the comic counterpoint to the sadness. Being from Japan, his easternness separates him from the uptight Brits.  Optimistic to a fault, he is a one-man rescue operation, attempting to weed out the malaise from the family tree. As Maurice’s new illustrator, he feels heavily indebted for this working opportunity; his subsequent willingness to attend to his master’s needs makes for a more touching Manuel-Mr Fawlty dynamic. However, Shun will develop into one of the show’s most fascinating characters, making him much more than a ‘let’s laugh at the funny man’s voice character.’

Other than the culture-clash comedy, the jokes are highly skilled. When Maurice is called into a meeting with his publishers, Carol and Carroll, over the protracted submission of his manuscript, he informs them that it won’t be long as “the words are flowing out like …”. The anticlimactic simile is Wildean in its wit, self-referencing Maurice’s writer’s block. Another lovely exchange arises from Deborah’s sister’s certainty that Maurice is having an affair with Shun. Deborah replies, “Maurice is a sensitive, colourful creative man. He’s not gay.’ Her sister’s deadpan response, “You’ve just described a gay man.” Although the show's tone is slumped shoulders, its words are straight-backed elegance.

As a caveat, I should say that initially the series might feel too eccentric for some. Inarguably, the characters are zany and a little cartoonish. But stick with it. Because over the course of miniseries, Sharpe disrobes their eccentricities, leaving them nakedly, majestically human. By the end I promise you will be won over, appreciating that in a pile of televisual faeces you have picked the solitary buttercup.

The whole of Flowers is available on Channel 4OD.