"It feels uncomfortable and weird. Like when there's a teenager on Countdown" - Stephen.
"You're a fixture. Screwed to the floor like a table in a seventies Butlin's" - Geoff, to Stephen.
Four years after its first series, Channel 4's Back is, er, back - and, much as it was in 2017, it's a joy. Quite a dark joy but a joy nonetheless. Created, and written, by Simon Blackwell and directed by Ben Palmer, the series begins with David Mitchell's character in rehab. He's running, he's cycling, he's doing yoga and he looks to be on the road to a full recovery even if that road, as any life coach will tell you, is likely to be bumpy.
Half-brother Andrew (Robert Webb) looks less happy. Dishevelled, balding, and disappointed that nobody seems interested in his fantastical stories about importing electric bikes into Uruguay. Andrew insists, regularly, he's a changed man, that his days of mind games are over, and that he just wants to help. But sometimes that 'help' seems to do more damage than it does good.
Although the heft of the drama, and much of the comedy, rests on the combative relationship between Stephen and Andrew, and Stephen's attempts to find out who his biological father is, the vehicles for moving this drama along are the opening of a new trendy, gastropub, P:UB, in Stroud to rival Stephen and Andrew's The John Barleycorn, their mother Ellen's (Penny Downie) relationship with man of the cloth Julian (John MacMillan), and uncle Geoff (Geoffrey McGivern is excellent again) and his sham marriage to Italian migrant worker Luca (Julian Kostov).
Geoff's eccentric ways and outlandish ideas have not abated at all since series one. He wanders around Stroud in a balaclava (it keeps his face warm), orders Lilt in the pub, describes a sheep murderer as a man who "in a more controlled environment would have been a family butcher", and spends evenings watching Kavanagh QC and pre 9/11 episodes of Springwatch (the Bill Oddie years he claims, incorrectly - Springwatch didn't air until 2005) with Luca.
He also wants to exhume his brother's grave with a JCB. Julian's been offered a post in a new parish, Tring - a word that is mined relentlessly for its comic potential, and sister Cass (Louise Brealey) is, as ever, making it all about herself. On becoming a student, studying the history of art, she decides she needs to live in a shared house but the housemates she gets are not your typical students.
Or students at all. There's an 89 year old woman and her carer Sally (Tsion Habte), there's Tom (Dan Mersh) who lives on whisky and popchips, is going through a divorce, and weeps as often as he breathes, there's a man (unseen) who stays in his room playing his congas all hours and never speaks, and there's a very angry, psychotic really, primary school teacher.
Determined to make the best of the situation, Cass rhapsodises about making tagines, putting up posters of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, and burning incense sticks. Watching these kitchen gatherings, and even more so scenes of people enjoying drinks and quiz nights in pubs, in these Covid blighted times gives the programme a bittersweet feel but to see that there is still no love lost between siblings Stephen and Andrew reminded me that, often, familial tensions can outlast pandemics and span years, decades, and even generations.
As Andrew ingratiates himself with Stephen's ex-wife's parents, Wendy (Penny Ryder) and Phil (Clive Francis), Stephen and his ex-wife Alison (Olivia Poulet) grow closer together as they seek to discover what Andrew's true motivations are, what his objective is.
Not everything works in Back season two, there's a slightly weak running joke about Stephen's inability to wear shoes - his feet are too wide, but when it does work, as it mostly does, it works very well. Confusing the saying "two peas in a pod" for "two peas in a pot", arguments as to where Tring is, the coining of the term 'hedge vodka', and a dice shaking mime that accidentally looks like a 'wanker' sign all elicit genuine, and hearty, LOLs and Stephen's meeting with the owners of P:UB with regards to a possible managerial position at the establishment brings about one of the best set pieces in the whole series.
P:UB, it is claimed, have realised they're being too pretentious and that they're alienating the locals. They want to go back to "peppercorn sauce on a big rump steak, swear boxes, lifeboat boxes, a little boy with a slot in his head, blokes selling warm crabsticks". It's as funny as it is well observed (much like the inclusion of a pub quiz team with that deathless name - Quiz Team Aguilera) but, perhaps, the real breakout star of Back series two is former Gold Blend salesman Anthony Head.
Head plays Charismatic Mike (not to be confused with barman Mike (Oliver Maltman) who, despite his impressive array of fancy shirts and his adorable relationship with barmaid Jan (Jessica Gunning) is said to have no charisma). Charismatic Mike, on the other hand, is an ageing lothario who wears an enormous watch he won off Salman Rushdie in a game of poker. He's taken part in the Paris-Dakar rally, he's run an expat bar in Montmartre as well as a hostel in Kathmandu, and he's sold Turkish rugs on the Silk Road.
It's a truly brilliant cameo and Charismatic Mike, along with Geoff, gets the lion's share of the laughter in this series but the story of Stephen and Andrew's relationship (with each other, with their mother, with their sister, and with Alison) is the dark beating heart that provides the dramatic backdrop that the comedy can either fly over or, occasionally, puncture and disrupt. It's good to hear Elton John's Tiny Dancer and Chicory Tip's Son of my Father over the final credits but it was even better to be, vicariously, back in the pub with these amusing and well sketched characters. It seems inevitable that Back will, before long, return for a third series. Hopefully, by then, we'll be able to go to the pub again instead of just watching others do it for us. Laugh? I nearly cried.
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