Bugger Bognor:Don't Forget the Driver.

"There's no sense in shivering until you start to freeze. What's the use of quivering and shaking at the knees?" - Oh, Don't the Wind Blow Cold, George Formby.

What a strange thing Tim Crouch and Toby Jones's Don't Forget the Driver was. A six part comedy that barely raised a snigger and yet remained compulsive viewing throughout. It was like an episode of Phoenix Nights directed by Bela Tarr or a public information film overseen by Lars von Trier. Pregnant with Pinteresque pauses, awkward silences, and words unspoken it was more likely to make you cry (or undergo a minor existential crisis) than laugh.

A grey and overcast Britain of clipboards, Tupperware sandwich boxes, polystyrene cups, jars of picked onions, mobility scooters, pub quizzes, Megadeth t-shirts, ploughman's lunches, Islamophobia, squeezy yellow mustard condiment holders, and St George's crosses flying from the wing mirrors of vans is the prosaic setting for this tale of a beleaguered coach driver, his family, his friends, and an asylum seeker who sneaks into Britain on his coach.

Coach driver Peter Green is played by Toby Jones and Jones does good 'beleaguered'. The last thing I saw in him was Michael Haneke's Happy End and this was, for the most part, just a little bit more bleak. It seems to me that Crouch and Jones are attempting to say pertinent things about Brexit, the failure of our political class to look after the working class, and, most obviously, the migrant 'crisis'.

It's a comedy (or maybe a drama?) that puts often marginalised figures centre stage. Immigrants, asylum seekers, transgender people, the disabled, and the elderly feature prominently and with neither fanfare nor demonisation. It's enough (hopefully) to give Piers Morgan and other bloviating blowhards a coronary.

The first thing you see are fridge magnets commemorating visits to Wookey Hole, Leith, Longleat, and Loch Ness. The next is a shoal (or whatever the appropriate collective noun is) of desiccated tea bags. This is the slightly sad kitchen in Peter's house. He lives here with his daughter Kayla (the fantastic Erin Kellyman) and he cares for his mother Joy (Marcia Warren) who lives nearby, also in the overlooked seaside town of Bognor Regis. A place that is probably most famous for George V's cursory dismissal of the town when, ailing, he was recommended a visit to take the sea air. His terse and legendary rejoinder:- "Bugger Bognor".

Peter's coach driving job sees him taking pensioners to visit Dunkirk war graves (though most of them seem more interested in visiting Calais for a booze cruise, even breaking out into a chant of "BOOZE AND FAGS, BOOZE AND FAGS" as Peter drives them down the autoroute), Babbacombe Model Village (an outing that featured a guest appearance from Perry Benson of Scum, Quadrophenia, This is England, You Rang M'Lord?, and Oh, Doctor Beeching fame), Legoland, and an incredibly dull retail park in Ashford, Kent.

His twin brother Barry (also played by Jones) has lived in Australia so long he's developed both the accent, and more disappointingly, the attitude. His colleague, fellow coach driver Squeaky Dave (Danny Kirrane had a small role in Mike Leigh's Peterloo) seems more interested in shagging and comes across as a bit of a prick. Polish mechanic Lech (Dino Kelly) has no home so sleeps on the coach at night. Despite being from Gdansk, well meaning Peter greets him with an "Auf Wiedersehen", perhaps a hat tip to another comedy that often erred more towards social realism than actual humour.

Fran (Claire Rushbrook) works at the PHIL-ME-UP SNACK SHACK (near a grey motorway underpass of course) with Kayla and she's Peter's putative love interest. Non-binary Bradley (Joe Eaton-Kent) is Kayla's best friend. Bradley works at a local funeral parlour. It's hard to know what to make of Bradley first of all. Initially they come across as pretentious and aloof but as the series develops they become one of the kindest characters in a story that overflows with them.

There's some real bastards too. Some guy with a mullet sporting denim dungarees who looks like Paul King wanders around threatening people, especially people who look 'different'. An African is told to "bugger off", a mixed race person called a "mongrel", and a character of Indian descent asked "where are you from?".

But luckily these racists and xenophobes are in the minority. For the most part Don't Forget the Driver does a good job of showing how most British people (most people) like to help out and how they try to get on with foreigners and immigrants (even illegal ones) despite the best efforts of demagogues and out and out fascists like Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins.

Better still, it deconstructs that Little Englander mentality and shows, importantly, how many of the older generation have kind intentions but are confused by the modern world so sometimes get things a bit wrong. It also shows how the supposedly apathetic younger generation are really not so apathetic after all. Something that should be abundantly clear to anyone's who's taken the slightest bit of interest in the words and story of Greta Thunberg.

Peter's a sweet guy with a deep and troubled interior soul. He's haunted by the image of a body he finds washed up on the beach in Bognor next to a bouncy castle, he wakes up in a cold sweat from his nightmares, he's made to feel inferior by his ghastly twin, and he repeats the word "bollocks" so often it becomes his virtual catchphrase. He's like a human embodiment of an out of season seaside resort. Grey and uncared for yet somehow still proud. Each time he looks out at the horizon we ponder, as surely does he, our own mortality.

His life is a litany of mundane British blues excuses, his tragedy rendered bathetic with the interruption of his Entertainer ringtone. But while there's a light dusting of bathos the whole series is drenched in a sea of pathos. It's like the lid came loose when the makers were pouring it on. The show's well made, it's well meaning - but a better comedy would have thrown the tragic moments into sharper relief.

My two biggest guffaws came when a Japanese visitor to Stratford-upon-Avon said "iambic pentameter" to Peter who, of course, thought his name was Bic Pentameter and when a cocky boater was told to fuck off.

It's hardly Lenny Bruce at the Jazz Workshop. Fortunately, it wasn't really laughs this show was mining for. It seemed to me as much art as it was comedy. Or, if it was comedy, comedy in a Shakespearean sense, comedy that blurs the line between itself and tragedy so thoroughly that no line remains. The line "remember when we broke down outside Didcot?" is surely engineered for tears of sadness rather than laughter!

The soundtrack, too, often pulls on our heart strings. It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. Heavy on Swedish pop and eighties hits. I even made a list of what got an airing:- Baccara's 'Yes Sir I Can Boogie', Motorhead, Abba, Roxette, Dire Straits, Mulatu Astatke, The Moody Blues, Foreigner, Dead or Alive, Men at Work, Spandau Ballet, Queens of the Stone Age, Madness, Take That, Duran Duran, Living in a Box, The Human League, Daft Punk, Jefferson Starship, Robbie Williams, David Bowie, Sting, Queen, Simply Red, Tears for Fears, Shakin' Stevens, and, er, Henry VIII!

There were nearly as many subplots in the story as their were artists on the soundtrack but the main narrative thrust is based upon Eritrean refugee Rita (a wonderful Luwam Teklizgi), a Tigrinya speaking teenager escaping national service and clinging to her cuddly donkey at all times as she suffers both culture shock and a few oh so predictable racist incidents. From a place where people says things as dumb as "if Churchill was alive today he'd been spinning in his grave"!

Slowly, carefully, Rita opens up and develops a warm and tender friendship with Kayla and, eventually, Joy. Joy appears to have been a casual racist all her life and watching Rita clean and air her sheets and hold Joy's hand as she lies in her bed facing out to the coast we're not just brought close to tears but we're shown a truly heartfelt bond forming between people who'd previously have no longer been aware of, or even curious about, each other's existence.

It's one touching moment of many in a series that really rewarded the viewer's patience. The sound of an amateur (very amateur) school brass band playing at a funeral (Bradley's first as director) of an unnamed asylum seeker who drowned in the nearby sea is enough to test the steeliest of hearts and when Fran, after a semi-rejection by Peter, looks her star-crossed 'lover' in the eye and says "it only gets straightforward when we die" she spoke volumes about how intertwined our notions of love and death are.

It was powerful stuff, it set me off (of course it did), and not at all what you'd expect from a series that started so quietly, so unassumingly. Despite having fewer laughs than I'd have hoped for Tim Crouch's Don't Forget the Driver managed to ramp up the tension and develop both the story and the characters exponentially while making some (sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle) points about what it's like to live in Britain today. Either as a native or as an 'outsider'.

With the current, and continuing, terrifying rise of the far right it was a timely and important exercise. It is, of course, just one small part of the fightback for a Britain of tolerance and a Britain of respect for all but in the masterful performances of Jones, Rushbrook, Eaton-Kent, Kellyman, and Teklizgi, the tightly plotted script, and the intricate observations of the minutiae of everyday life Don't Forget the Driver was something of a minor masterpiece.