Outnumbered: Series 1 (2007) & Series 3 (2010)

Outnumbered has me laughing out loud every week and series 3 was no exception. The deceptively simple sitcom set up of a family with 3 precocious children belies how special and downright hilarious this show really is. The three children, Karen (Ramona Marquez), Ben (Daniel Roche) and Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey) are the stars - the two youngest, Karen and Ben, are unscripted, which makes every nugget of comedy gold they utter all the more surprising and hilarious. 

My favourite of the children has to be Karen, she's just the funniest and most endearing, whereas Ben can be a little irritating. Jake is the only child who has had a running storyline this series, in his infatuation with his 18 yr old neighbour. 13 year old Jake captures perfectly the hormonal agony of puberty, and his attempts to be seen as mature and worldly invariably don't work, but they're terribly sweet. In the final episode his feelings for his crush are exposed in an excrutiatingly embarrassing Freudian slip and the horror of his revelation is clearly etched in young Drew-Honey's face. I really felt for Jake at that point, and the actor showed that he has a lot of promise. 

The parents, Sue and Pete, played by Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis, are ineffectual, endearing and exasperated, often all at the same time. The actors do well to compete with the child stars, and are both believable in their improvised reactions to the random utterances that come from their co-stars. It was interesting to see a rather serious storyline played out this series as Sue finds out that Pete kissed another woman while drunk. The way Sue handles this news, while they both try to keep the children from listening to their grown up talk, is often subtle, and other times just damn funny. I hope that future series continue this through-story style as opposed to the more stand-alone approach of the last series (I've got series 1 on DVD as I missed that first time round, so not long til I can see more Outnumbered!).

EDIT: I've now seen series 1 on DVD - we devoured it in a few days after seeing the co-writer, Andy Hamilton, on stage. The first series turned out to be almost as funny as the third, although it took a few episodes to gel together, perhaps when the actors were all more comfortable with each other. The children seem a bit less sure of themselves in the first couple of episodes. Sue and Pete's characters are both firmly set from the get go, however, and the fact that Samantha Bond's Aunty Angela character, just a 1 episode guest star in series 2 and 3, was great spread across 5 episodes here. Her fractious relationship with Sue providing some of the best moments, particularly in the last episode when everything comes to a head. And my word how young did Jake look then, only 3 years earlier?? The interviews on the DVD were very interesting too, giving an insight into how the show is filmed and scripted. Of course now I want to revisit series 2...