Colin from Accounts: a show so fearless and hilarious that I want to get a tattoo of it
It’s deliciously satirical, fizzes with electric chemistry – and it’s snortingly funny too. If you haven’t watched the worst named show on TV yet, do so. Right now!
Sometimes the best things in life have the worst names. The Beatles. Smeg fridges. Nintendo Wii. But top of the tree is Colin from Accounts (Monday 7 September, 10pm, BBC Two), a name so bland I almost slipped into medical unconsciousness upon hearing it. It’s worse than bland. There’s an aspect of comedy-tie zaniness to it, a “Look, we’re calling our possibly office-based sitcom the most boring thing we can think of!” tedium. One can imagine the lazy jokes, the stock characters. Within 15 minutes of watching it, I was genuinely toying with the idea of a CFA tattoo.
How did this unpromising Australian import become my favourite? By being a showcase for fearless writing, electric chemistry and delicious comic timing. Written by real-life partners Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, it tracks the relationship of medical student Ashley and Gordon, a brewery owner and ball cancer survivor. The romance, like their writing, is allergic to schmaltz. Their meet-cute occurs in the street when Ashley flashes a boob at Gordon, causing him to crash his car and permanently disable a stray dog that they unwillingly adopt together. (That’s Colin. It’s not really about Colin.)
If you haven’t watched the show before, you need to do that today. Right now. For Colinheads, this final series picks up three years after the cringey climax of the second, when a public declaration was badly handled. I’m impressed when shows do this – jump forward a few years between series. It shakes the snow globe, jumbling relationships and a world we’ve come to love, coating them in fresh unfamiliarity.
Thankfully, the characters are all present and incorrect. Ashley is now dating a pickleball player who works for an inner-city trout farm, and stinks. Her best friend Megan is a lesbian mumfluencer, having conceived using sperm donated from James, Ashley’s ex. Megan still has a frisson with Gordon’s colleague Chiara, the mother of three whose bisexuality she awakened. Chiara, meanwhile, is having an emotional time disclosing her recent ADHD diagnosis. “Who cares?” responds Gordon. “You’re in your 40s. It’s not like you’re in year 8 maths, distracting everybody.”
In Colin from Accounts, no one escapes satire. Ashley’s deluded mother, Lynelle, is still standing by her man – a grotesque creep called Lee who lost his job following an online sex scandal. To defend his honour, Lynelle founded anti-feminist group WAWAM (Women Against Women Against Men). Now they’re married, the group has blossomed into a men’s rights advocacy and business platform. They counsel weedy losers to step into their male energy, mostly by yelling “I’m the man of the house!” This nearly made me wet myself. There’s a backlash on the horizon though, in the form of protest group WAWAWAMEN. You work it out.
For all the brilliant ensemble clowning, it’s the love story that cements the show’s greatness. Brammall and Dyer are magnetic and tuned to each other, as the argumentative brewery boss and borderline-alcoholic graduate, now a practising GP. The first scene, which throws them together as doctor and patient in Ashley’s new surgery, sets up the question of the series: can these exes be just mates, and co-parent a dog? Given their fizzing banter, mutual attraction and the fact their every interaction could be subtitled with the word “yearning”, it seems as likely as a fruit bat and a chimpanzee co-parenting a banana.
The show is definitely more romcom than sitcom (unless the sit stands for situationship). It makes me think about the criticism most levelled at romantic comedies: that they are fantasies, with nothing to say about the ongoing pressures of actual relationships. Here is one real enough to show us ambivalence and irritation between its lovers. It runs on messiness, breakups, age difference, money imbalances, sexual exploration and fertility panics. It does so with peppery, snortingly funny gags, and all without selling out the genre’s central article of faith – that love is real, and will out. I have snot-cried to this show.
If the true test of the heart is embracing what annoys you, then Colin from Accounts is the best name for a show ever. I can’t conceive of a better one. I would be with this show if it were a worm. It’s classic and current, comforting as a quilt. I kinda wish it wasn’t back. Love hurts, but tattoos hurt more.
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