Well they haven’t uncovered another Steptoe & Son or Are You Being Served? but this recent revival of the BBC’s sitcom-spotting Comedy Playhouse strand has definitely been interesting. Over To Bill tried to mix broad humour with Curb Your Enthusiasm inappropriateness, while Miller’s Mountain felt like Mrs Brown’s Boys stuck up a Scottish hill. So what about the final instalment, Monks?
It’s a relief to say that they probably saved the best until last. They certainly saved the best cast until last. Danny Robins' sitcom stars James Fleet, Mark Heap, Seann Walsh, Justin Edwards and Fergus Craig as a mixed bunch living in Rudley Abbey, surely the smallest monastery in Christendom thanks to the BBC production budget.
The set-up is that Gary Woodcroft (Walsh) is avoiding prison for benefit fraud by hiding in the abbey, as you do. This doesn’t really have much effect on the script though, except that it speedily establishes blokey Gary as the curveball of the group. But he is hardly the only curveball. This is a traditional sitcom after all, so they all have to have laugh-inducing traits. Brother Francis (Heap) has anger management issues, while Brother Bernard (Edwards) looks like he is partial to the odd glass of communion wine or three. Oh, and Angus Deayton literally phones in his part as a dodgy Vatican Cardinal who they call for help.
The basic plot finds the monks needing to raise some cash urgently, which they do in the most unlikely of ways. It’s all pretty fast-paced and nothing too intellectually taxing, but of the three sitcoms in the short run this is surely the one that might have the most legs. It’s mainstream, but not quite as painfully old hat as it could be.
Inevitably there is a whiff of Dibley about it, given the religious theme. There would be even without the presence of Dibley regular James Fleet as the Abbot. Irreverent gags about the church abound. Meanwhile Edwards’ booze-guzzling red-cheeked Bernard has a delivery not a million miles from his stand-up creation Jeremy Lion. Fergus Craig is good as Brother Dominic, the Baldrick-ish simpleton of the group, while Seann Walsh, the nominal star, acquits himself well as the lad finding unlikely sanctuary.
But it’s Mark Heap who stands out in Monks. Like Kevin Eldon, Heap has a epic comedy CV, but he has never really been defined by one role. In Monks he is not working entirely against type – he brings a lot of his trademark pompous physicality to the part – but there is something very different going on here. Not just the spiky haircut instead of the usual fringe, but an inner rage bursting out. Nobody can demolish a cardboard suggestion box with quite as much venom as Heap.
I don’t know if Monks will get a commission, never mind go on to be a long runner, but it does have the potential to be habit-forming (sorry, couldn't resist...). Interestingly a Radio 2 version entitled Hey Hey We're The Monks has previously been made, as well as a non-broadcast pilot starring James Corden in 2008, so it suggests a degree of faith that someone is having another crack at it. And at least it shows that this revival of Comedy Playhouse has managed to come up with one reasonably decent comedy out of three, which by BBC standards is not a bad batting rate. Praise be for that.
Monks is on iPlayer here.
