BROKEN BISCUITS, BBC1, 10.35pm
This is the second episode in the current revival of The Comedy Playhouse where new comedies are put before us and maybe one of them will be made into a series. This is how several famous sitcoms such as Steptoe and Son and Last of the Summer Wine were born.
I adored last week’s offering, Hospital People, but this week’s is a vastly different type of humour. Hospital People was anarchic and surreal, done in the well-known “mockumentary” style where several characters who worked in a hospital were interviewed about their work. All of them were oddballs.
Broken Biscuits is far more measured and sedate and the characters more realistic. Co-written by the comedian Craig Cash, it features several people who speak directly to the camera. There is the old couple who’re having bother with their smoke alarm and who disapprove of their son’s wife; she’s far too concerned with shopping and even has John Lewis on speed-dial. There is a cranky old couple who run a guest house, thinking they’re a cut above their rivals because they take care to place a single Rolo on the pillows and always pick the hairs off the soap.
Gradually their “broken” stories merge and things become slightly more caustic towards the end.
SHETLAND, BBC1, 9pm
This latest series of Shetland got off to a slow start, I thought. Watching the ferry come in and the same stern police stalking the same grey streets I felt little flutterings of boredom which were only alleviated by the presence of Ciaran Hinds in the cast. But Hinds was soon killed off and we might have thought the series dead with him, but it shook itself to life. Tonight it ends and I’ll be sorry to see it go.
Perez confronts Phyllis to ask if there’s anything she’s not telling him. Could there be a question more loaded with significance? Soon he’s booking himself on the next flight to Glasgow where he finds himself haunting the dilapidated shipyards, old pubs and neglected stretches of the riverside – it brings back nostalgic memories of Taggart.
Kelly announces she’s pressing charges as she’s ”sick of feeling like a victim” and Tosh plucks up the courage to make a call to the Rape Crisis phone number but can’t bring herself to speak, and neither does she feel able to face a trial. “I have to do what’s best for me,” she says but what she has planned shocks poor Jimmy who seems utterly exhausted by everything.
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