Allotment review – a Walsall sitcom that finds comedy in a shed
★★★★☆ Channel 4’s new comedy about a plot committee at war over a water butt is the funniest thing the broadcaster has made in years
The best British sitcoms have always been about small rooms and smaller stakes, and Allotment, which started on Channel 4 on Thursday, has found a setting so perfectly suited to the form that it is a wonder nobody has used it before: 42 plots on the edge of Walsall, one committee, one standpipe, and a waiting list of 11 years.
The writer, Priya Chandrasekar, who came up through the Birmingham stand-up circuit, has built the series around Barbara, the committee secretary, played by Maureen Latimer with the terrifying calm of a woman who has laminated the rules. Her antagonist is Deano, a newly retired bus driver who has inherited plot 17 and a belief that he knows better about everything, played by Steve Garraway as a man who is constantly, cheerfully wrong.
The first episode concerns a water butt. That is the whole plot: whose it is, where it should be, and whether Barbara has the authority to move it. It is 24 minutes long and I laughed out loud nine times, which is roughly nine more than most sitcom pilots manage. The second episode, about a judging visit from the regional allotment federation, is better still.
What makes it work is that Chandrasekar actually likes her characters. Nobody is a grotesque. Deano’s wife, Carol, who takes over the plot while he sulks, is given a quietly lovely arc about discovering that she was the gardener all along. A teenage lad on the plot next door, Faisal, played by newcomer Zain Mirza, turns out to know more about soil pH than anyone, and the series lets him be right without making a lesson of it.
The direction, by Rob Ashdown, is unshowy in the right way: a fixed camera on a shed door, a slow pan across a row of beans, a reaction shot held a beat too long. The theme tune is a brass arrangement of what sounds like a Black Country folk song and is, I am told, an original written for the show. The whole thing feels like it was made by people who have spent time on an actual allotment, which the production notes confirm they have.
The one flaw is the series’ fifth episode, previewed to critics, which leaves the plot for a committee meeting at the civic centre and loses its footing the moment it loses its sheds. Allotment is a comedy about a place, and it should stay there.
Allotment is on Channel 4 on Thursdays, with all six episodes streaming now.
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