Friends did it…just. My Family perhaps didn’t quite do it, but got away with it in the end. The Office definitely did it, to much upset at the time, but looking back it was the right thing to do.
They all quit while they were ahead.
Outnumbered was once a brilliant British sitcom: but, going into its fourth series, you can’t help but wonder whether it’s just taken one step too far. The reason it was so funny – the bumbling parents with whom everyone could identify with aside – was the children; specifically the two youngest, Ben and Karen.
In the earlier series, Ben and Karen (played by Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez) weren’t even given a script. It was written, but never passed to them. Writer Andy Hamilton spoke about this in an interview with the Guardian in 2008, when the second series of Outnumbered was about to be aired:
Firstly, to avoid the children sounding scripted, we decided not to give them a script. We would write a script – otherwise we would not get paid – but we would only give it to the adult actors. The kids would not be allowed to see it. We would tell them the gist of a scene, then wait to see what came out of their mouths.
The result? Karen stuttering as she struggles to find words, before coming out with something utterly brilliant and – quite often – amazingly profound. Ben would conjure up images that only a young boy could think of, and could never be thought up by adult writers. And it made the sitcom incredibly funny. There was a genuine chemistry between parent and child which almost made the programme feel more like a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary and less like a sitcom.
Don’t get me wrong – there are still parts of this fourth series which make you crack a smile. But it’s lost some of the magic it once had, the spontaneity that made you shake your head and wonder what on earth goes through kids’ minds. It’s a real shame: but it seems that Outnumbered has numbered one too many.
I haven’t seen the latest series, but it has always been one of my favourite sitcoms. I love it for the same reasons, but may give the latest one a miss for a while.
It’s worth a watch if there’s nothing else on, but don’t cancel any evening plans for it!
Personally I loved the ” no script idea ” ,the actors can really face many of the strange and awkward things kids might really say ! it was so real as you said more like a documentary.
Definitely. In some scenes you can see the adults desperately trying to respond to what the kids have said!