Early Doors and the death of the traditional sitcom
They're currently repeating Early Doors on BBC4, Tuesday nights at 9:30pm, just before Mad Men, in fact. You'd be forgiven for not knowing the first thing about Early Doors , because unlike Mad Men it's a series that existed almost completely without hype. Originally, 'Doors (as nobody calls it) was set to be Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne's follow-up to the multi-award-winning, insanely popular Royle Family , with the writing duo playing the landlord and landlady of a northern watering hole. That idea was scuppered when Aherne's well-documented "issues" got the better of her, and she buggered off to Australia and wrote a near-identical Aussie version of the Royles while she was there. Undeterred, Cash drafted in Phil Mealey as his new partner and carried on writing the new show, which can fairly be described as the Royle Family in a pub. Perhaps BBC bigwigs perceived the show to be too derivative and lacking in star power after Aherne's departure,...