#1 Nighty Night
Julia Davis' subversive, seminal 00s sitcom is 20. Its monstrous heirs have finally arrived.
At the end of last year, I became a tiny bit over-invested in a sitcom called Such Brave Girls, about two depressed and delusional 20-something sisters struggling with their respective romantic relationships amid an insanely toxic mother-daughters dynamic. I watched a preview of it a few weeks before it aired and had that euphoric feeling of having found something truly great (even though, obviously, I hadn’t actually discovered anything at all: this was about to air on the BBC, i.e. as overground as comedy gets). Anyway, I thought it was utterly incredible - viciously dark, ridiculously relatable, laugh-out-loud funny (rare, very rare, in this dramedic era) - and so I asked to interview the real-life sisters behind it: writer and lead Kat Sadler and her co-star Lizzie Davidson (you can read the piece here). One thing I really wanted to know was whether Sadler was inspired by Nighty Night, Julia Davis’s pitch-black comedy that debuted 20 years ago last January. Such Brave Girls seemed to channel that show’s brutal skewering of female relationships and perfectly-pitched insensitivity, and I hadn’t seen anything in that vein for a long time.
To my surprise, Sadler said she hadn’t seen Nighty Night when she wrote her show - although she had subsequently watched and loved it (the production company that made Such Brave Girls was also behind Sally 4Ever, Davis’ unbelievably repulsive 2018 comedy series, which Sadler was shown, leading her to seek out rest of Davis’s oeuvre). I thought maybe it was an age thing - Sadler was only nine when the show came out - but I then saw that the even younger social-media-star-turned-comic-actor Lucia Keskin (23), whose own sitcom, Things You Should Have Done, also came out recently, had been very vocal about Davis’ influence. You can definitely see that in TYSHD - a deliberately moronic, low-energy caper about a woman whose recently deceased parents posthumously orchestrate a series of life lessons for her -which, I will admit, I didn’t really love (not quite to Joanna Page levels, though), but am very glad exists .
Still, I thought it was interesting that two of the UK’s most interesting “hard” (as in, focusing fully on trying to be funny, rather than profound or moving) comedies of the past year both recalled Nighty Night, a show whose wholly outrageous transgressive pleasures, in my opinion, have never been bettered (although Joan & Jericha - the fictional agony aunt podcast Davis hosts alongside Vicki Pepperdine - comes very close). For the uninitiated, Nighty Night centres around Jill, a trashily glam West Country beauty therapist-slash-sociopath who is more than willing to do over anyone who comes between her and her desires. Those desires mainly centre on Angus Deayton’s Don, husband of her “friend” Cathy, who has MS and uses a wheelchair.
In series one, Jill invites Don and Cathy over for the world’s grimmest party, in which she gaslights and physically assaults Cathy whilst trying to seduce Don. Nibbles are a nauseating vista of brown meat (ox, lamb, deer, sheep and duck), while the main is “smashed prawns in a milky basket” with their “faces” removed. Davis is a master at making food stomach-churning (see also: the bubbly milk from her excellent period drama parody Hunderby). I do think this is a particularly British thing, with our reputation for culinary poverty. But the main thing that makes Nighty Night an incontrovertibly British work is the fact nobody ever confronts Jill about her beyond outrageous behaviour: we are, obviously, a nation that fails spectacularly to speak our minds. Cathy is absurdly polite and accommodating to Jill - one of the best episodes involves Jill badgering Cathy to buy her a necklace before rejecting it. Interestingly, Davis has said that it is Cathy with whom she primarily identifies.
I’m always surprised how few people have actually seen Nighty Night (it is on iPlayer now, but wasn’t for many years) because I think it’s probably where a certain strain of 00s comedy peaked. That era was, looking back now, full of problematic subversion - Little Britain had premiered the year before - and although I generally consider the landscape of “edgy” comedy to be strewn with victims, Nighty Night manages to be shocking without ever feeling cruel or smarmy. Not only is it a carnival of scatalogy (much of it stemming from Ruth Jones’s imbecilic goth sidekick Linda) and general horror (murder, etc), but Davis approaches things like incest and paedophilia (in Nighty Night, Jill attempts to seduce Cathy and Don’s 12 year-old son) so hilariously that it forcibly dismantles your internal barometer of offense; I still can’t work out how she manages it.
Nighty Night looms large in the comedy nerd world, but it’s still essentially a niche concern. Similarly, I couldn’t help but feel that Such Brave Girls didn’t get the profile it deserved (in spite of me individually pestering everyone I know to watch it, weirdly). Hopefully the fact it won best comedy at this month’s BAFTAs might push more people towards it: an acknowledgement not only of Sadler and Davidson’s talents, but also of Nighty Night’s obscene brilliance.
NOTES AND RECCS
I’ve fallen headfirst into a vat of David Sedaris essay collections; I’m currently racing through his back catalogue in a rather haphazard order, which strangely seems to be adding more poignancy to the stories about his family as they grow older, or don’t (his mother died before any of these books were published, and his grief and love for her manifests as a continual background hum). The later stuff is gently amusing, but the early books are absolutely hilarious - I was in actual pain reading Naked (1997). Yet I keep expecting him to write about life in the UK in some capacity - Sedaris, who grew up in North Carolina, moved to Sussex in the early 2010s and now apparently spends the majority of his time picking up litter there. However I’m yet to find much on the topic; recommendations welcome!
I have been dipping into A. G. Cook’s (on brand!) new album Britpop. The title track, which features Charli XCX saying “like Britpop” a billion times, is so hilariously UNlike anything you would associate with Britpop as a genre or movement, but it is brilliant and addictive. Cook, in my opinion, is the best thing to have happened to British music this decade; if you have no idea who he is then you can read this interview I did with him in 2020, or this farewell to his seminal label PC Music I wrote last year.
I also recently finished the much-hyped new Andrew O’Hagan novel Caledonian Road, about an art critic enmeshed in the web of high society and whose network is being exposed by a young hacker. I have been hankering for an accessible, middle-brow state-of-the-nation novel for a while now and this certainly delivers on that front (you can’t write about London without writing about Russian oligarchs, obviously). Yet some of the dialogue made me sweat, in a bad way - I don’t know whether the middle-aged upper-crust actually speak like O’Hagan has them doing but his dialogue for the 20-something Londoners (especially the working class characters, who he romantises to an alarming degree) feels fantastical and incredibly forced. Oh well.