Daddy, what’s a twat?” Ramona Marquez was just five years old when she uttered this line – surely the stuff of every parent’s nightmares – in the 2007 pilot of Outnumbered on BBC One. It was one of her very first pieces of dialogue as Karen, a sweet-faced mess of blonde curls with a knack for difficult questions. The encounter, which took place with her frazzled father one morning before school, set the tone for the frenzied family sitcom which, for seven years, followed the Brockmans as they grappled with the unhinged reality of controlling three wayward children.
The show returned for a Christmas special in 2016 (in which Karen was a teenager glued to her glittery iPhone), and it’s back again this year for another one-off festive episode. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner are reprising their roles as parents Pete and Sue, with Daniel Roche and Tyger Drew-Honey back as Karen’s older brothers Ben and Jake. “It’s classic Outnumbered chaos,” Marquez, now 23, tells me from a shed in the garden of the home she shares with her girlfriend in southeast London. Details on the episode are a closely guarded secret, and Marquez is only really able to tell me about one plotline. “We’re joined by a grandchild [Jake has had a daughter] – so Karen’s an auntie!”
