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The Royle
Family History Few could have
guessed that a little-heralded show beginning one
Monday night in the BBC2 backwaters would fast
become not only one of the best situation comedies
created for British television, but also command a
strong influence over the vernacular at the turn of
a millennium. But although deriving in essentially
unproven writers, and with its modest, downbeat
setting, The Royle Family was a great piece of
work, a delightful oasis in an otherwise largely
barren period for British TV comedy. Seinfeld was
always said (wrongly) to be 'a show about nothing',
but that phrase is better suited to The Royle
Family. The setting was a humble council house
somewhere in Greater Manchester; the camera
position was usually fixed, rarely leaving the
sitting room and never once leaving the house. The
characters mostly sat, and sat, and sat, and their
television was rarely switched off, providing a
permanent background drone to the conversations,
and a convenient filler when dialogue had lapsed or
become too tense or awkward. The characters were
all 'couch potatoes', and their dialogue -
typically spoken while they remained focused on the
TV screen - was genuinely humdrum, with few
obviously 'smart' lines. And yet the combination
was often hysterically funny. It didn't take long
for sociologists to realise that this comedy show,
depicting a very average working-class family in a
very normal working-class setting, was as true to
British life, if not more true, as any of the
ubiquitous docu-soaps with which it fought for a
place in the schedules. The Royle Family
(in the wake of its huge success, it was often
forgotten just what a clever title this was)
constituted four principal characters. Mam and Dad
- Barbara and Jim - as parents of children Denise
(in her early twenties) and late-teen Antony. Jim
is opinionated, fat and lazy. Unemployed, he rarely
rises from his armchair, and usually then only to
announce that, in best rhyming slang, he's off for
an 'Eartha' [Kitt]. Jim's primary obsession
is thrift, and he can become almost apoplectic
about profligacy. His language is coarse, though
only rarely nasty, and he has no airs and graces -
he can often be found hunting for food debris in
his bushy beard, picking his nose or re-arranging
his genitals, whatever the company. ('I'm not
fiddling with meself! I paid a quid for these
underpants and I've got 50 pence worth stuck up me
arse.') Being the woman
of the house, Barbara is something of a slave
labourer, and most of the chores are her domain.
She works outside the house, too, in a bakery,
bringing home the occasional bun or doughnut, and
also bagsful of gossip with which to bore the
others, chattering away while smoking endless
cigarettes. Barb's propensity to natter about the
inanities of life often irritates Jim, and though
their relationship is built on solid ground it is
far from harmonious and they regularly flare up at
one another. Eldest child
Denise has a close alliance with her mother -
theirs is the pivotal relationship of the piece -
and it is one that she exploits all she can. Though
unseen by the viewer, it is clear that Barbara
spoiled Denise throughout her childhood; now she is
a spectacularly lazy individual - perhaps the most
bone-idle character to populate a sitcom. She does
almost nothing but watch television and flick
through mail-order catalogues. If she goes out at
all it is usually to get 'bladdered' at the pub
with her boyfriend (and later husband) Dave. The
wily Denise uses her close relationship with Mam to
help her exploit and provoke younger brother
Antony, a gangly youth who, perhaps even more than
Barbara, is the most put-upon member of the Royle
family, press-ganged into undertaking many a menial
task, whether answering the door or the phone ('Get
that, Antony!') or popping to the off-licence to
buy chocolates or cigarettes, or making a pot of
tea ('a brew'). For the most part, Antony accepts
his lot, but just occasionally, especially if the
demand is from Denise, he will baulk, at which
point he will be confronted with a united front -
from Mam, Dad and Denise - and capitulate. Though
she loves Antony, Barbara will always do Denise's
bidding against him, and as a consequence he can
often be the butt of any anger that happens to be
flashing around the room, although this rarely
lasts for more than a few seconds before everyone
resumes staring balefully at the omnipresent TV
screen and begins another strand of usually tedious
conversation. The other main
character is not a Royle. He's Dave Best, Denise's
boyfriend and eventual husband. He is, like the
others, virtually a part of the furniture, slumped
down on the same cigarette-hole-ridden settee with
Denise and Mam. Dave is a man of limited horizons,
who earns a small cash income from removing
household furniture, using the same van to run a
mobile disco. Possessed of a simple but warm sense
of humour, Dave has formed a male alliance with Jim
that, on occasion, they use to rile Denise.These,
then, were the principle characters, but there were
also lesser though still important players. Norma
is Barbara's aged, widowed mother (Nana to Denise
and Antony), who lives in her own flat across the
city but spends much of her time at the Royles,
eating, gossiping and complaining. She is a woman
of little complication, often befuddled and
frequently repeating herself, and so thick-skinned
that she scarcely notices the gentle ribbing she
receives from her grandchildren. She hears all too
well, however, the far-from-gentle cynicism of Jim.
He may once have been on his best behaviour with
his mother-in-law but those days are years past. He
is now unremittingly rude to her, an attitude that
only occasionally earns a meaningful rebuke from
Barbara; otherwise, it is part of the verbal
tapestry of the home.The Royles' next-door
neighbours, the Carrolls, are also an interesting
bunch. Joe is devoid of personality and almost
totally silent - one suspects he has been
browbeaten by his wife Mary - unless, that is, he
has been drinking, at which point he becomes
voluminous, even breaking into song. Mary, an
Irishwoman, is a fusspot mother hen, often popping
around to the Royles unannounced (she simply walks
in through the ever-open back door) to bill and coo
over the latest mail-order catalogue. Mary and
Joe's daughter, Cheryl, is a good friend of Denise,
and so she too is a frequent visitor. Of plain
looks and dumpy figure, Cheryl has also had a
personality bypass and is riven with self-doubt,
especially over her weight. Her constant diets seem
to add, rather than shed, the pounds, although she
deludes herself to the contrary and manages to
ignore Jim's unsubtle jibes about it. Hers seems to
be an empty life, and the gluttonous food intake
and propensity for sweets and cakes is probably the
result of emotional inadequacy or an actual
disorder. In an era when
the majority of television directors believed that
they must impress the viewer with technological
trickery, The Royle Family was a minimalist
triumph. The fixed setting and the mostly immobile
camera permitted the viewer to feel he was in the
room with the Royles, sharing in the tension and
laughs that reverberated around the
nicotine-stained walls. And the production team was
never afraid to take risks - one of the most
memorable scenes occurred when the Royles and Dave
were tucking into some chocolate bars. The camera
panned slowly around the room, dwelling on each
character as they consumed their different sweet;
the scene lasted all of a minute, without dialogue,
and was spellbinding. Bravest of all,
however, was the accuracy. The phrase
'dysfunctional family' had become commonplace in
this period, especially in sitcoms, and it was
gripping to observe the Royles almost as if they
were a zoo species, to witness the warmth, the
jealousies, the rivalries, the affiliations and the
arguments, and to realise that this was, rather, a
functioning family, with unique qualities to handle
its crises. The scripts, especially in the first
series, were masterpieces of emotional intensity;
the Royles processed the many flashpoints in the
fashion that is familiar to us all, with an aside
or a laugh that neatly sidestepped the issues and
moved them on to a more comfortable place. In this,
especially, Barbara was the lynchpin; from her
suppression of anger, she seemed aware, if only
subconsciously, that she held the key to the
family's stability. This was never better
demonstrated than in the episode when she was
feeling particularly menopausal. With Barbara in a
dangerous mood, everyone else was on tenterhooks,
robbed of balance, their life in a temporary
turmoil. The show's three
series all played towards a specific goal - the
first leading up to Denise and Dave's wedding, the
second to the birth of their child, the third to
said infant boy's christening - yet there were
significant differences from series to series,
underlined (and perhaps caused) by changes behind
the scenes. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash wrote
all three series but they shared the task in the
first with Henry Normal, in the second with Carmel
Morgan and in the third they worked only as a
twosome. Similarly, the directors changed, with
Aherne herself in control of the third series. As
it went on, the episodes became harder edged. Two
in the second series ended with Jim Royle's temper
flaring, unresolved. And the introduction of
Darren, Antony's friend, was fascinating. Here was
a character of real tragedy, a young man who was
clearly the product of a troubled and socially
deprived background, now set irretrievably on
course for a problematic life. Socially and
educationally backward, awaiting trial for a second
criminal offence, he is not funny but angry. When
the Royles gather for Antony's 18th birthday, when
Jim plucks away at his banjo, when Joe sings, while
Ant and his girlfriend Emma hold hands, when Norma
weeps and Barbara consoles, Darren descends into a
pit of despair. Similarly, Jim Royle's attitude
towards Norma became ever more harsh; at first,
although he was rude to her, this was, for the most
part, light-hearted. In latter episodes he was full
of real anger, his jovial remarks spilling over
into spite. Throughout,
however, all such moments served only to underline
the excellence of the premise. And, whatever the
tensions, the next laugh, however cunningly
disguised, was rarely more than a moment away. In
these respects, and in its working-classness, The
Royle Family was a direct successor to the mantle
of Till Death Us Do Part, being extraordinarily
funny, revealing and true. Johnny Speight had
written that earlier show based directly upon his
experiences of people and life in the East End of
London; Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash were writing
here about the northern working-class families and
lifestyle in which they both had been raised. (Jim
was an approximation of Cash's real father, Barbara
was like Aherne's real mother.) The Royle Family
did not replicate the tremendous social and
political stir caused by Till Death Us Do Part in
the 1960s - television's ability to shock has
naturally diminished with its every occurrence -
however the impact was as great as any modern
sitcom could possibly accomplish. The Royle Family
was blessed, too, with triumphant performances.
Everyone played their part to perfection and was
able to do what was asked of them: to act
naturally. Several of the players were familiar
from TV soap operas, especially Sue Johnston and
Ricky Tomlinson, who had previously been a TV
husband and wife in Brookside and were little short
of sensational in these Royle roles. Liz Smith, as
Nana, was as eye-catching as ever, and Caroline
Aherne, Craig Cash and Ralf Little were terrific.
With a thoughtful Oasis song ('Half The World
Away') as the theme tune, and a credit sequence
that paid simple, monochromatic homage to the
movies of Woody Allen, these half-hours were close
to perfection. Great sitcom, my
arse. The Royle Family
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