Interesting to hear today that Lee Mack and Catherine Tate are going to star in a UK remake of the American sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond entitled The Smiths. I can't predict if the UK version, relocated to Cheshire, will be a hit, but it sounds well cast. Both Mack and Tate have a track record at the kind of broad comedy that Raymond excelled at and they also have a track record of working well together. They were in a sketch show together at the Edinburgh Festival that picked up a Perrier Award nomination in 2000 and Tate also played a part in the original pilot of Not Going Out.
This transatlantic transfer makes a change from the heavy flow of sitcom traffic going in the other direction lately. Most UK sitcoms, from Pulling to The Thick of It to, of course, The Office, seem to have made their way across the Pond with varying results. At least the success rate in that direction is better than it once was. Legend has it that when they made a pilot of Fawlty Towers back in the eighties called Amanda's and starring Golden Girl Bea Arthur, some executive said "I love it, but let's lose that crazy guy called Basil and concentrate on his wife." It did not last long.
A remake of Men Behaving Badly didn't fare too well either because of the law that says you can't have ugly people on American telly. Making the leads look cool meant that the flatshare sitcom lost the spotty, jug-eared charm of Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey. Red Dwarf is said to have had a similar issue, while the less said about Spaced the better.
Yet maybe the two countries are currently closer than ever in terms of sense of humour. In the UK we all love Friends and Curb Your Enthusiasm – well, all my friends do – and America seems to have taken Ricky Gervais to their hearts. ITV1's Vicious is written by Will & Grace alumnus Greg Janetti. And, of course, Anglo-American co-production Episodes was written by Americans and was all about the travails of English sitcom writers turning their parochial hit into a syndicated blockbuster.
So, as I said, I can't predict whether this version of Raymond, reportedly written by Lee Mack, will be a hit, but it has more chance of being a success than it would have had a few years ago. It may also fit it quite well with the current vogue for mainstream old school comedy. Raymond has never been a cool show like Seinfeld. And any remake has got to be better than The Wright Way. And of course, if it is a hit there will be no shortage of scripts for Mack to adapt, if that is the plan. While The Americans only had twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers to rework, between 1996 and 2005 Everybody Loves Raymond ran for a staggering 210 episodes.
