Madeline Appiah, left, and Fay Ripley in Kerry Jackson
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Imagine the sitcom Miranda, but with prejudice, politics and savage wit on the agenda instead of whimsy, and you’re halfway to April de Angelis’s odd but enjoyable romp. It puts an uneducated, 52 year-old, leave-voting Essex woman in charge of a tapas bar in smug Walthamstow Village, and gives the assumptions and pieties of both sides of that social divide a proper going over. It’s schematic and frankly unbelievable but it made me laugh a lot and features a cracking central performance by Fay Ripley.
Her Kerry has a slo-mo estuary accent, an un-chic wardrobe and ‘Dave’ inked on her bum, but she also has middle-class aspirations for her restaurant, El Barco. Unsubtly, she tries to get local worthy and woolly liberal Stephen (Michael Gould), a philosophy teacher, on side in her campaign to stop a homeless man, Will (Michael Fox) begging outside and defecating by her bins.
