Blossoms, Tom Walker and Malorie Blackman are on the show!

On BBC1 tonight, 9:30, it’s last in the series of Lee Mack sitcom Not Going Out. I’ve been writing for it since the beginning, over 12 series, so I’m grateful it’s still on a decade and a half later. Lee Mack plays Lee – quite a reach for him – originally a layabout bachelor, now a layabout husband and father. Still each episode he gets into the scrapes and social dilemmae that sitcom characters get into. This series, that’s included struggling for conversation at the school gates... texting the person a message is about instead of who it’s intended for... and jury service while really you’re fixated on who’s scratched your car. All navigated by an everyman who thinks the world is against him, so digs holes for himself, makes it all worse – but generally admits his faults by the end of each episode.

Sitcoms are little morality plays – modern parables where disorder becomes ordered, misunderstandings lead to deception or cover-up – but ultimately the truth will out, via hilarity, or attempts at it, along the way. Crime doesn’t pay and dishonesty doesn’t prevail in sitcoms. It just doesn’t make sense to us. Good always wins. From Basil Fawlty to Fleabag, we live vicariously through these characters. ‘There but for the grace of God go we’. Charlie Chaplin observed: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot”. Zoom out, you see life’s patterns. The mistakes we repeat. The bad habits we can’t let go – because like an episodic sitcom, we may learn, but... we come back next week and we make the same mistakes all over again.

I see it in the Bible too, from put-upon Job, who can never catch a lucky break in life, to the biblical Proverbs: ‘Pride comes before a fall’ or ‘The righteous fall seven times, but they rise again.’ Ancient and modern, we try and break these cycles – but our continual blunders are all part of the human condition. Repeats, eh? So as our lives are recommissioned for another series, let’s laugh at our failings, together. Because no man is an island, apart from the Isle of Man. And yes, that’s a line from Not Going Out. I won’t say who wrote it, but let’s say if you laugh, it’s one of mine; if you don’t, probably someone else’s.