Mining the familiar can be a route to comic gold. Gregor Fisher’s Rab C Nesbitt worked a treat because his string-vest-wearing alcoholic deadbeat was beautifully and instantly recognisable. He could have ambled onto your TV set from the streets of Govan. Mining the familiar can also, however, lead down comic culs de sac.
In Only Child (BBC Scotland), Fisher’s 74-year-old, Ken Pritchard, is also instantly recognisable, but less so from real life and more as a staple of British comedy. This doddery old Luddite could have ambled in from umpteen sitcoms of previous decades. He comes equipped, of course, with a foil: another stock character – the sensible, eye-rolling son, Richard Pritchard (Greg McHugh). Yes, it rhymes.
Bryce Hart’s series has a solid set-up. Richard is a bit-part actor in a popular crime drama (the plausibly named Detective Manners), shuttling between London and his home town of Forres on the Moray coast to care for his incapable father, who was widowed a year earlier. When his career stalls, however, he ends up lured back to Forres, helping his dad with the inevitable tech headaches, bills and pills. There is a winsome old flame, a nosey neighbour, an off-kilter landlord and lady in the local pub. There are pratfalls, misunderstandings and a spattering of scatological humour.
Among the sitcom contrivances, however, are some truly enjoyable flashes. Ken keeps his birdseed in an old children’s potty, his only friend is a puppet he got from a charity shop, and his life is controlled by an arcane series of alarms that go off to remind him to do things. Fisher is also given some beautiful lines, which he delivers with his usual sandpaper-edged aplomb: “Funerals are a social contract, Richard. You go to theirs, then they come to yours.”