The Catherine Tate Show and Nan

image c Tiger Aspect / BBC

The Catherine Tate Show
2 / 5
Nan
3 / 5

Series: Three (plus specials and charity specials)
Aired: 2004 - 2007 (- 2015 spin-offs: Nan)
Channel: BBC One, BBC Two
Writers: Catherine Tate, Derren Litten, Mathew Horne et al
Cast: Catherine Tate, Mathew Horne, Niky Wardley, Angela McHale, James Holmes et al

The Catherine Tate Show is a comedy sketch show, written and starring Catherine Tate. It features many recurring characters, some of whom are now well-loved staples of British Comedy, including a lazy school girl and a foul-mouthed geriatric, and has offered many special episodes and charity sketches, plus a spin-off dedicated solely to Nan.

If you'd have asked me before I re-watched this sketch show how many stars I'd give it, I would have gone with four, maybe even five stars. It seems trivial to explain my enjoyment of anything in stars, but it tends to work with things like this. This sketch show was the one that we would say over and over again in the playground at school. Every generation has one: a comedy that is repeated by school kids all over the country, and for my school it was this. Mostly it consisted of continuously asking people if we were "bovvered", but quotes were often thrown about on MSN (anyone remember that?) and my memory of The Catherine Tate Show was completely mixed up with these halcyon days.

However, since re-watching the whole series, I must confess I find it slightly lacklustre. From the off the best-loved characters are there: Lauren is there asking anyone if she's bothered and Nan is there distrusting absolutely everyone and whinging about the smallest of matters. But watching it made me realise that really these two characters are the only things that are above average about the sketches.

Part of the problem was that we revisited a lot of the characters far too much. It felt like a weird mix of sketch and sitcom, with some sketches lasting up to five minutes. Sketch shows are not the pinnacle of comedy, but for light relief they're perfectly fine and welcome in small portions-but those portions must be small. The sketches featured here felt overdone because the same characters would come back and do the same joke over and over, just with different words. We'd have the office woman trying to make her colleague guess at something, with the colleague getting it terribly wrong. The first time, this is very funny: it's real and you can relate to it. But after the seventh or eighth time it's simply just a bore.

Recurring characters are all very well, but with sketches, development of their personalities is virtually impossible and so we only need the funny situation and then we're gone. But of course, that creates the problem of us having to laugh at the same joke multiple times, often in the same episode.

It felt like a bit of a let down because my memory was so high up on the comedy scale of enjoyment. Nan, on the other hand, was something quite different.

Following a successful one-off in 2014, Catherine Tate's Nan returned for two more episodes over the Christmas period in 2015. These are more in the sitcom genre than sketch, but they still retain some of the sketch elements that Catherine Tate is best known for. The thing that Catherine Tate does so well with Nan is make her so utterly believable. We all have an older relative who is, how shall I put this?-casually racist and just a bit fed up, and Nan is exactly that plus quite a bit of exaggeration. This is comedy in its element.

Nan is a fun character who makes us cringe because she tells a truth of what our older relations are like. A different generation trying to cope in a modern, changing world. It's not about right or wrong with Nan, it's about how to cope with that kind of person and their views. In most cases, it's pure laziness to remain ignorant, but there are often wonderful moments in the development of Nan where she is taking out of her ignorance. Having said that, there's no doubt that Nan was created just to be something funny.