One of the clichés often trotted out about television shows is that the characters “start to feel like family”. After all, as we grow up, become more atomised, spread out across the world, it’s easy to find yourself spending more time with the cast of your favourite TV show than with your own kith and kin. But while it’s a trite observation, it’s also quite true of the BBC’s Outnumbered, which puts middle-class British family life under a microscope, revealing its facts and follies for all to see.
As it makes its long-awaited return this Christmas, Sue and Pete Brockman (Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) have some news. Some big, scary – whisper it – cancer news. But they aren’t going to let that derail their Christmas plans, as the three Brockman children – Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey), Ben (Daniel Roche), and Karen (Ramona Marquez) – descend upon the family home for the festive period. Oh, and then there’s Jane (Hattie Morahan), the local irritant the Brockmans can never shrug off, who becomes an extended interloper for the holidays. “This place is so much smaller than the last place,” says Sue, as the brood arrives at the new digs, “and they’re so much bigger.” And so they are: eight years have passed since the last Outnumbered special, and the kids are now in their mid-twenties.
