Housesitting for a friend rarely leads to the death of the pope from drinking inferior wine, but in the 24 minutes of the Black Books episode Grapes of Wrath, some extremely absurd dominoes fall to help it make sense. What starts as something relatable and pedestrian – doing a favour for a friend – quickly spirals into a maniacal modern-day retelling of Frankenstein, with the monster being replaced by a bottle of expensive hooch and ending with the death of a clergyman.
This is a regular theme in the Bafta-winning comedy series, created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan: taking regular and small moments from everyday life and exploding that mundanity into utter absurdity.
The premise is simple: misanthropic Bernard Black (Dylan Moran) owns a secondhand bookshop, the perpetually hapless Manny (Bill Bailey) lives and works with him, and the third leg of their alcoholic and somewhat toxic trio, Fran (Tamsin Greig), spends most of her time drinking in the bookshop with them.
Each episode starts off with something upsettingly normal: a hot day, the necessity to do taxes, a new coffee machine, a confusing temp job, a small holiday. The comedy comes from these characters’ almost complete inability to engage sensibly with the world around them.
One of my favourite episodes, The Big Lockout, takes Bernard out on to the cold streets at night after he’s been locked out of his shop, forced to engage with movie theatres, pornography shops and fast-food stores, an escalating horror that’s both unique to him but also somehow completely understandable. You begin to see why these people have withdrawn from the world and hide out in a grimy bookshop, smoking and drinking. The outside world is surreal and strange and antagonistic.
Rewatching the series, I’m struck by how it hasn’t aged badly – politically or comedically – except for perhaps a couple of broad and regressive stereotypes. Black Books creates and wallows in such a unique world of its own making, there’s almost nothing that can become dated. This is a theme obliquely explored through the three short seasons of the show. In the first episode, we meet Manny because he’s looking for The Little Book of Calm, declaring he “hates his job” and is stressed all the time. He ends up accidentally eating The Little Book of Calm and becoming a kind of stoned tranquil prophet, ultimately quitting his job and working at the bookstore instead. Before the current trend of the great resignation and “quiet quitting”, the characters in Black Books were leading the way – albeit in a booze-focused, nihilistic manner – and not just in their careers; they essentially use the bookshop as a way to quietly quit all the horrors of being alive.
Every so often the trio will seek to better themselves or re-engage with the world at large: Bernard wants a girlfriend for the summer; Manny gets a job at a fancier, franchise bookstore, which ends up being a cult; Fran gets into yoga or learns how to play piano and tries to quit her vices. It’s always an absurd and disastrous quest, with the takeaway, if there is one, that trying is pointless.
It’s easy to see much of Moran’s brand of grouchy-yet-silly standup comedy in this show, and on a line-by-line basis, it’s almost endlessly quotable. It relies on absurd imagery and witticism, rather than American sitcom setup-and-punchline kind of humour. I don’t know what was in the water in Britain in the early 2000s (probably something like “the shadow of Thatcherism” or “biscuit austerity”), but it’s similar to the absurd humour we see in The Mighty Boosh or The IT Crowd – often based on hilarious descriptive comedy.
“You are being very mean to Manny” complains Fran, to which Bernard replies, “I can’t help it. He looks like a horse, in a man costume!”
Black Books also has a gorgeous commitment to physical comedy – always relying on character performances (Manny continually sitting on his own testicles while pretending to be a cop), prop goofs (Bernard freezing a bottle of red wine and eating it like an ice block) and slapstick (Manny getting a headache every time his phone rings).
Like its characters, Black Books almost exists outside of the rest of society – hard to explain, unconventional and inherently funny.
