Scan and pan: Early Doors

Early Doors, the first series of which has just ended its premiere screening on New Zealand’s UKTV (it first screened in 2003 in the UK), catalogues the tiny pleasures of a humdrum life. The episodes generally begin as the punters try to take advantage of ‘early doors’: rapping on the smoked-glass in the minutes before a non-existent evening rush, eager to cajole choleric Ken the landlord into opening perhaps a couple of minutes early.

The Grapes, you see, is a grim, 1970s-style pub that still closes in the afternoon — a quick glance at a regular like Tommy will tell you why there’s no “happy hour” here — and it’s populated exclusively by a small group of regulars.

Early Doors is as cosy as vinegary chips out of the newspaper after closing time, a pint of mild and the racing pages, a bus trip with the lads to a strip club, an after-hours natter with the punters.

Punters such as the last of the fat romantics, Joan (Lorraine Cheshire) and Eddie (Mark Benton). In a moment all their own, Joan downs her pint and belches shamelessly. The besotted Eddie gazes at her, smiling, “Another, my love?”

“Yuss,” beams Joan, as though it’s a Caribbean holiday on offer.

Joan is openly amused about her senile mother’s misfortunes. The unseen mum, you see, is a few bristles short of a bag of pork scratchings, one of those Life of Grime dog lovers (meaning she lives in a kennel) with a personal hygiene problem.

Eddie’s concern, though, is a rogue set of temporary traffic-lights that’s sprung up in the neighbourhood. You might say it’s his raison d’être. And one of Early Doors’ better running gags is Ken (John Henshaw) avoiding Eddie’s laborious explanation of how to avoid the lights. He couldn’t give a shit.

It’s a series in which the characters are everything, and although it seems effortless and the actors’ craft invisible, each cast member deserves credit for pulling off this gently victorious locked-door session. Tommy, for instance (played by the formidably sour-faced Rodney Litchfield), is that permanent fixture of every northern bar, “the miserable old bugger in the corner”, eking out his mild misery and refusing to let you buy him a pint, no matter how generous you’re feeling. “No thanks, I'll stay on me own,” he gurns, tempted, but knowing that accepting would mean having to buy you one later. He hasn’t been able to live on his own pension since his wife died, so has a secret occupation as a lollipop man. Suffer the children, and all that.

Joe (Craig Cash) and Duffy (Phil Mealey), with their sensibilities left behind, like so many of their brain cells, in the 1980s, quote Level 42 lyrics at Liam (James McAvoy), the historically challenged boyfriend of Ken’s step-daughter, Melanie (Christine Bottomley). Joe and Duffy are a couple of northern lads who’ve had a number of run-ins with an unmarried mother called Janice (played by Maxine Peake, memorably Twinkle in Victoria Wood’s Dinner Ladies). Duffy, who’s married, might just be the father of Janice’s baby, Calvin. Or was that Joe? We’re never quite let in on their secret.

Ken is the kind of beer-bellied rogue you wouldn’t want to mess with, but you can’t see his soft side for the bar. His wife has run off with his best friend and his beloved step-daughter is about to rediscover her biological father. Touchingly, Ken encourages Melanie to meet him, and it’s a stunning piece of denouement when he finally confesses to his regulars that he’ll miss her if she goes to live with him. These are just not the kind of men to open up to each another emotionally, and so the landlord’s cigars are particularly bittersweet as Eddie can’t resist driving home how many minds Ken is in about his domestic predicament.

The Grapes’ other main regulars include Phil and Nige, a couple of cops, who drop in for beers and cokes (the latter for whoever’s driving the patrol car) in the back kitchen. Their policing is comically ineffective, but somehow they succeed in being endearing, in a lazy, good-for-nothing way. After spouting a litany of vehicles parked with their wheels on the pavement, drivers doing 33 in a 30mph zone and other insignificant misdemeanours to prove that they’re on top of the local crime wave, Ken drops an armed robbery into the conversation to underscore how things have gone to the dogs. “Armed robbery?” ask the feckless coppers, with expressions of terror. “When did this ’appen?!”

The executive producer of Early Doors, Phil McIntyre, was behind some of Victoria Wood’s shows, as well as the very funny Phoenix Nights, but this appears to be Adrian Shergold’s first series as a director. After both writing and appearing in the extraordinary The Royle Family, the show that really was about nothing, Craig Cash (who played the son-in-law, Dave Best) and Caroline Aherne (Denise Royle) had planned to write Early Doors together. She’s even credited in the titles. But then Aherne, overwhelmed by her success as Mrs Merton and with problems of her own, left for Australia, where she was later to write Dossa And Joe, produced for the BBC by Granada. So Cash persuaded his friend Phil Mealey (Duffy) to co-write and appear in Early Doors with him.

Just as on The Royle Family, Cash’s writing is flawless, so the dialogue feels devised rather than written, understated and yet on the money. You usually only come across such dryness and easy humour in real life, and you feel as though you’re there with them. At the very least, you somehow crave having your jacket sleeves stuck to the stale bitter on the bar top of The Grapes. I certainly remember being drunk in pubs like this all over Britain, and the denizens were as obnoxiously lovable as these people.

Mark Lewisohn reckons this is “the best bar-room sitcom since Cheers”. So although Early Doors opens slowly and the first episode may revolve you right back onto the pavement, I urge you to step back into the warm, have another pint and a bag of cheese and onion crisps and make a night of it. Whatever you do, though, don’t drop your fag-end into the urinal.

“To the regiment — I wish I was there!”