There She Goes

BBC4 doesn’t have much in the way of original British comedy and drama, but when it does it’s often exceptional. Burton and Taylor and Detectorists spring to mind as to the channel's quality programming. Its latest offering There She Goes is currently my favourite programme on television. Writer Shaun Pye, responsible for Monkey Dust and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, has created a family sitcom that is both hilarious and vital.

Pye has written the sitcom from personal experience. The sitcom revolves around Rosie, a child with a severe learning disability, and her parents’ failure to cope. Pye and his wife had a child, like Rosie, with a chromosomal disorder. The sitcom is the transposition of the their life into thirty minute episodes. Some of the events are of course embellished, but the kernel of them is true. The idea for the sitcom came from years ago when Pye wrote Facebook posts about his domestic situation. His humour was gallows in nature, laughing in the face of condemnation; his daughter the jailer, he the prisoner. The posts were well received because people admired the honesty behind them. In the play of life, disability is often depicted as an interminable tragedy that doesn’t allow for levity. Pye though realises disability can be funny. And to laugh at disability is not to laugh at the disabled, but to laugh at the situations it throws up.

Shaun Pye. (You might remember him from Extras.)

There She Goes begins with dad Simon (David Tennant) and brother Ben (Edan Hayhurst) taking Rosie (Miley Locke)  to the park for a kick-about. The trouble is Rosie  isn’t interested in going. She performs a sit-in on the pavement in way of protest. Simon is reduced to calling his wife Emily (Jessica Hynes) for assistance. Emily opens the door and sees the civil disobedience in action. It’s down to her to break the strike and send the striker back to work. She and Simon pick Rosie off the floor and bundle her - like a murdered body - into the car. The journey to the park? About ten seconds. Immediately this scene establishes the humour and challenge in having a disabled child. Tasks that should be simple are bloody difficult when someone doesn’t want to play ball; the only option is to laugh in the face of defeat.

Rosie’s ability to outwit her parents at every stage- despite being learning disabled- is a real joy to behold. In episode two we see Rosie get excited over a picture of a bubble bath. Simon and Emily knows what this means. Their daughter wants to be bathed, and bathing means bubbles, and bubbles means trouble. Simon excuses himself with a carrier bag of food; an ‘I have to cook’ get out of bath time free card. It falls on Emily to perform the kind of mission that Ethan Hunt would refuse to accept. Getting Rosie in the bath is easy; getting Rosie out of the bath is impossible. When bath time is over, she tenses her body, becoming a dead weight. Even with two of them, Simon and Emily can’t get her out. Rosie is the ruler of her kingdom; she will come when she’s ready. Emily’s attempts to bait Emily out of the bath is comedy gold.

There’s another side to There She Goes though that elevates it beyond entertainment. The story flashes back and forwards over ten years. The scenes I’ve touched on are set in 2015-16, hitting the sitcom beats of build-ups and pay-offs. In these moments we see a united family that love Rosie in all her exasperating glory. Running alongside this though is Emily and Simon’s past, which to excuse the pun, isn’t so rosy. Here, we see how Emily struggled to cope with the realisation that her daughter wasn’t like her son. We see a mother’s struggle to connect with her daughter. Jessica Hynes is fantastic in these scenes, reflecting the confusion that stems from things not turning out the way you planned. In one heart-breaking moment, she explains her feelings to Simon, ‘What if you lost a child, but there was something there, just reminding you of it all the time?’ She sees Rosie as a haunting, a ghoul reminding her of the child she never had. On the other hand, Simon finds connecting with his daughter simpler; what he finds difficult is understanding his wife’s depression. Where he should be helping to pull his wife out of the abyss, he instead drinks himself to oblivion. The fact that we still empathise with Simon is a testament to David Tennant’s nuanced performance.

So There She Goes has it all. It has comedy that will make you laugh, and drama that'll make you cry. It has the happiness of seeing a family laugh in dysfunction. It has the edge of parents making fun out of their disabled child (in a good natured way though). It really is wonderful.

There She Goes is on BBC4, Tuesday at 10pm. Previous episodes can be watched on the iPlayer.