Desperate to prove to his alpha-male father, with his cardigan-wearing, roll-up smoking alpha male friends, that he is a provider, a hunter-gatherer, a man. Since the beginning of series one, Stath, who was born in Cyprus and moved to London when he was eight, has been desperate to be a man. Stath Lets Flats – a sitcom about an idiotic manchild who fits somewhere snugly between Mr Bean, Frank Spencer and Basil Fawlty – has what most modern comedies (or comedy-dramas) dare not: subtext. It’s warts-and-all with a prurient lingering on the warts. You’re left in no doubt about the writer’s history. You’re left in no doubt about the show’s themes and message. Their protagonist splurges all at the screen.
Fleabag, Chewing Gum, This Way Up et al deserve their plaudits, but there is something determinedly route one about them. Did the Fringe show only have six decent jokes? No problem, one per episode, that’ll do nicely. Edinburgh Fringe shows inflated to six 30-minute episodes. The vogue in TV comedy at the moment, of course, is for thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-pieces. Not a thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-piece. Not a first-person confessional diatribe. Now, yes, I must admit that the first joke in the third series – and the first of many, many belly laughs – is Stath forgetting the name “Bernard” and coming up with “Gernold”, and the central gag throughout is that everyone in the show is some shade of stupid, but Stath Lets Flats trounces the competition by the sheer fact that it has the guts to be a comedy. It’s the most cerebral, emotional and subtle comedy on TV. Think that, however, and Demetriou has sucker punched you all. Perhaps it doesn’t pull in the viewing figures because people write it off as jolly slapstick or awkward cringe comedy or zany pratfalls or crude clowning. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, to put it another way – if a sitcom wins three Baftas, and no one watches it, is it a comedy classic? In the case of Stath Lets Flats (Channel 4), Jamie Demetriou’s oddball sitcom about an inept Greek-Cypriot lettings agent in north London, undoubtedly so.
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