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Leave 'em wanting more

Leave 'em wanting more

The last laugh doesn’t always go to the longest-running show…

Ashley and Gordon from Colin From Accounts; sat in the front seats of a car, with their pet border terrier in the back behind them

CBS Studios Inc / Easy Tiger Productions Pty Ltd / Foxtel Management Pty Ltd / Create NSW

Caroline Frost

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As it does for just about everything cultural in the western world, The Simpsons hit the nail on the head when it comes to defining what makes the perfect British sitcom.

An episode in series 11 sees Homer Simpson chance upon “Do Shut Up”, a British comedy that’s a pastiche of everything we know and love about our home-grown funnies, including a family falling out while getting drunk and a mother who’s “the voice of reason”. As the credits roll, the presenter praises “England’s longest-running series” and promises, “Today, we’re showing all seven episodes.”

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I thought of this, having binge-watched series two of Colin from Accounts, the Australian comedy about a couple brought together by a car accident and an injured dog, the sweet-faced Colin of the title. Real-life husband and wife duo Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer’s first outing as pooch-crossed duo Gordon and Ashley became one of the surprise hits of late 2022, and the good news is that the second series is just as pleasing, packed with tragi-comic one-liners and highlights including a cameo from Kevin Bacon, a visit to Gordon’s family and Colin apparently impersonating Paul McCartney.

In fact, Colin from Accounts is so good I fear it must now end if it’s to take its deserved place in the canon of the classic sitcoms that have properly stood the test of time. Fawlty Towers set the benchmark for short, sweet and immensely satisfying, with a mere 12 episodes – its curtailment down to John Cleese, who felt he and collaborator Connie Booth had simply said it all.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant could have extended The Office but pulled the plug after two series. Of course, all these auteurs had other stuff to do – Gervais and Merchant repeating the trick with the two-series Extras – but this creative quartet of Cleese, Booth, Gervais and Merchant made their permanent mark on the world of comedy in just 26 episodes between them – that’s 175 episodes fewer than the US version of The Office ran to.

Harriet Dyer as Ashley and Patrick Brammall as Gordon in Colin from Accounts, sat together on one side of a dinner table

Other writers have shared this confidence to defy huge audiences, and presumably big pay packets, to bow out early and leave us wanting more. It’s testament to the material that The Young Ones appeared to sum up the early 1980s even though it only ran for 12 episodes, while Spaced had the same influence on the turn of the century, despite a total of just 14 shows.

Then, sadly, there are those that prove the reverse to be true – what we can call “the shark-jumpers”: that moment when a show runs out of good ideas but carries on anyway – a term inspired by a late-Happy Days era Fonz leaping over a live shark on waterskis. His leather jacket remained in situ, but everything else was a shadow of the show’s former greatness.

Back in Blighty, I’d say ’Allo ’Allo!, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s ambitious French resistance sitcom, suffered the same fate, eventually running four years longer than the actual Second World War. Bread may have peaked with an audience of 21 million for Aveline’s wedding in 1988, but it rolled on to a disappointing finale after 74 episodes. I could list many more, but you get the point.

Patrick Brammall as Gordon in Colin from Accounts, smiling

And yes, there are also the exceptions to prove the rule, such as Rev and After Life, which both served up a third and best series. There is, indisputably, the almighty Blackadder series four. OK, and I’ll also make an exception for Dad’s Army, still beloved after 80 half-hours.

But there’s also one big last lesson from comedic history: Last of the Summer Wine proving through 31 series that there really is a finite number of times we can laugh at a bathtub bouncing down a cobbled street. Surely better to go out with a bang, not this kind of whimper, and leave the party early. I love it, but I’d rather Colin from Accounts finish now than go to the dogs.

Authors

Caroline Frost

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