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(More customer reviews)Every so often a sitcom comes along that stays with you for a very long time after you've watched it, and "Nighty Night", the BBC's most recent sitcom-to-DVD conversion, is just such a thing.
Jill Tyrell (Julia Davis, the show's writer and creator, and a fabulous comedy actress, to boot), a beautician in a nondescript Northern town, is devastated to learn that her husband Terry (Kevin Eldon) has cancer. This happens to be the first scene of the first episode, and it's the last rational reaction you'll see for the next three hours. Jill, not one to rest on her laurels, decides a new man is the order of the day, and, before Terry is even ill, much less dead, deposits him in the hospital and heads off to find a man. Enter the unlucky Don (Angus Deayton), and his multiple sclerosis-afflicted wife Cathy (Rebecca Front), as Jill's new neighbours. Deciding that he's the man for her, and blindly ignoring the fact that Terry doesn't seem to be getting any sicker, Jill goes about driving a wedge between Don and Cathy, and keeping Terry's presence a secret from all and sundry.
As with "The League of Gentlemen", "Nighty Night" is a comedy that gets laughs from its situational absurdity. The main characters, with the exception of Jill, are portrayed beautifully as normal, rational people cast headlong into an unreasonable situation, but, thanks to the machinations of the ensemble of secondary characters (such as the gloriously funny Ruth Jones as Jill's long-suffering employee and friend Linda, and the wickedly irreverent Mark Gatiss as her erstwhile paramour Glenn Bulb), they soon find themselves descending to a level of abnormality that they're clearly not comfortable with. Happily, this makes for the best viewing, and "Nighty Night" is one of the best comedies to come out of Britain in recent years.
Julia Davis as Jill is monstrously cruel, totally self-centred and completely sociopathic, but, as with all good anti-heroes, she manages to generate such sympathy for the character that we are rooting for her to win, in the end. It's a brilliant portrayal of a character, that, in the hands of a lesser actress or with less care taken over the finer points of the script, could easily have sunk into one-dimensional nastiness. Happily, Davis has created in Jill Tyrell a sitcom heroine to rival - and beat - the likes of Basil Fawlty, Patsy Stone and Vicki Pollard at their own game.
I'm not going to give anything away, so I'm going to end my review here, suffice it so say that here are three of the best and funniest hours you could ever own on DVD. Extras - outtakes and almost twenty minutes of deleted scenes - are wonderful, and the audio/video quality is, as one would expect from the BBC, top-drawer.
Wholeheartedly recommended as an essential purchase.
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NIGHTY NIGHT:COMPLETE SERIES 1 - DVD Movie
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