Alan Carr is not only the flavour of the month but a certified national treasure after winning The Celebrity Traitors, so ITV could hardly have picked a better time to launch a new series of Changing Ends.
Carr’s semi-autobiographical sitcom about his life growing up in 1980s Northampton had already proved itself as a little slice of joy, and the third series doesn’t let the side down. The young Alan, played with uncanny brilliance by Oliver Savell, is now 13 in 1989 with his hormones raging for Jake, a handsome boy in his class who has a Saturday job at the Athena poster shop, aka “Woolies for perverts”.
Carr’s observations and one-liners remain nimble on their feet. He always considered women, he says of coming to terms with his sexuality, as being a bit like olives: “They turn your stomach at first, but if you persevere, you learn to love them.”
The real Alan Carr then popped up to chew an olive while screwing his face up to show how wrong he was. His sport-obsessed father (Shaun Dooley), manager of the local third division football team, is the exact opposite, loving sporty women. “He only ever looked at a cleavage to see if there was a stopwatch there.” Good line.
It is an inventive and original way to tell a story, switching between the older and the younger Alan and it never becomes mawkish or sermon-like, even when dealing with him being bullied at school for being camp, an experience that must have been painful but which he wears very lightly.
The comedy comes first. Such as when his little brother dealt with the bullies who had thrown his spectacles into the swimming pool by throwing a chocolate bar in the water, telling the teacher there was a “poo in the pool” and so it had to be evacuated.
It is Carr’s attention to the tiny details that make it such a cheerfully textured comedy, such as a man in the pub using a beer mat as a toothpick and the young Alan insisting on wearing a swimming cap otherwise “I get a real cow lick”.
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True, the odd detail feels a bit obvious, such as Blue Nun wine in the fridge, but to those of us who were there in the 1980s it sometimes feels like time travel (in a previous series Carr cited Etam clothes shop — what a blast from the past!).
Carr essentially serves up a nostalgic portion of Britain and a nice little world of characters who make for joyful company and to whom you want to return time and time again. Which is exactly what a sitcom should do.
★★★★☆
All episodes are available on ITVX
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