ShitComs Episode #1: Mad About Alice

In this series, we look back at sitcoms that lasted merely one series, and try to figure out where they went wrong. From the Beeb to Fox to ITV, why do these comedies even exist in the first place?

It's January 2004. The past December had seen handheld mobile phone use in cars banned in the UK and the capturing of the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein. Between the still-infant and not yet quite as transparent War On Terror and the irritant of having to go to Currys to buy a hands-free device for your car, Britain was in dire need of some light relief. The 23rd of January saw in the inaugural episode of Mad About Alice on BBC1, which ran for just six episodes. Mad About Alice starred Amanda Holden in the main role. The previous year she had finalised her divorce from former Family Fortunes presenter Les Dennis, and was starring in Manchester-based hair salon drama Cutting It. Things were looking up. 2003 was also the last year in which her soon-to-be co-star, Jamie Theakston, stopped presenting Top of the Pops. His on-screen partnership with Zoë Ball had come to an abrupt end. These two pop culture figures were meandering their way through the new millennium, trying to make sense of a post-9/11, pre-Yewtree world. So they join forces for one series of Mad About Alice, a fairly terrible sitcom.

The very first seconds of Mad About Alice are enough to convince you, if not of its awfulness, then of its effortless mediocrity. The intro theme music is a duet sung by Theakston and Holden. Here are the lyrics. Holden's words are in italics:

I remember a time when we didn't row.
What, before we met?
Well we're not together now.
I can't believe the chaos that surrounds you.
Well, what would you know?
Oh, just look around you!
It's Mad About Alice.
Please don't remind me.
Mad About Alice –
Alright don't go on about it!
(Together)
But we know despite the things we say,
We wouldn't have it any other way.

The song is signed off with a cheesy American-style "ba-da-badaa". Herein lies the first issue. Before we've even started we get the impression that whoever's making this is not trying to convince us that it's going to be good. The theme song and accompanying graphics are a warning sign. Turn back, there is nothing but pain here. Suffering awaits all those doomed to enter.

Mad About Alice follows the story of Alice, a newly single mother of 10-year-old Joe, and her regular altercations with ex-husband Doug. The now ex-couple try to navigate bourgeoisie concerns such as getting your child into the posh Catholic school and being a disreputable interior designer. Doug is a doctor, and for the most part a massive wanker. Theakston plays Doug with such irritating incredulity at every idea his ex wife has that you wonder how the director made it through each episode without arranging a stage light to fall on his head. He looms over Holden's petite Alice like a pot-bellied redwood.

It's all just so unbelievable. Holden is not the right person to play a downtrodden single mum of one. She doesn't do stressed-out well. She has that late 90s sheen, the glow of a girl next door from Neighbours. When she neglects to put her trousers on in episode one to save time for the school run, it just looks as if she's showing off. Debra Stephenson, who is cast as her highly sexual and uncouth teacher sister Kate, would have been far more suited to the role.

I know it's not cool to rag on child actors but it's cool because Billy Hill, who plays Joe, is probably my age now. His incessant blinking is a window into the tiny stage school cogs whirring in his head. He has no reaction to his parents' constant bickering, mooching down the stairs after a noisy ruck just to reference a gory film he watched, like someone with half their brain missing. Jess Carrivick, who plays Sancha, Joe's stereotypical 'weirdo' mate, at least acts a bit like she knows what she's doing. But really, what were these children meant to do with a script like this?

Theakston plays a doctor, but I would rather have my blood taken by fucking Count Dracula than this arsehole. In one particularly poor scene, Doug insists that he only holds doors open for attractive women he wishes to have sex with. This is purely to set up a crap joke later on in the episode in which Alice accuses a man of perversion for holding the door for her. The show is a cavalcade of these shit set-ups. The characters have no personalities, no humanity – they are merely loosely thought-out conduits for jokes that aren't very good.

There is a deep sense of claustrophobia to Mad About Alice. The entire series revolves around one essential aspect of the main relationship: that they always row. They fight. They argue until they're blue in the face. No wonder they got divorced! But instead of this being witty, you feel trapped in their horrible, pointless relationship, inside their creepy house, which only has one room and in which most of the action takes place.

The series concludes with the two discovering that their divorce papers weren't even signed, so they're technically still married. Great. Whatever. Married, not married, who gives a shit? It doesn't matter because it's been made to not matter. Their relationship is not believable, their new partners are one-dimensional, their child might as well be a cardboard cut-out of another more interesting child. And it all begs the final question: why should we be Mad About Alice? Her middling white wine complaints, her witless shenanigans, her clear feelings for Doug, the paunchy man-mountain who is only polite to women he wants to fuck. The only thing I'm mad at Alice about is that some terrible arsehole wrote her into existence in the first place.

While Holden went on to bigger things, like being a judge on reality TV wanker Glastonbury Britain's Got Talent, Mad About Alice proved to be the last real leading TV role for Theakston, who had bit parts in more successful shows like Miss Marple and Little Britain (along with more unsuccessful ones like ITV2 radio sitcom FM). Perhaps this is poetic justice for their crap characters; the nice allowed to fly away into the loving arms of Ant and Dec, the other shot through the core of the earth to be the voice of Caught On Camera.

@joe_bish

More from VICE:

The Complexities Of The Human Sitcom

How 'Friends' Created a Generation of Neurotic, Self-Obsessed Idiots

We Should Probably Put Ben Elton On Suicide Watch