Dave won't move his moped out of the boxroom. As plotlines go, it doesn't promise much but through a process of alchemy, the secret of which is known only to Caroline Aherne, it was transmogrified into 30 of the funniest TV minutes of the last year. It may all be in the details, but such a surreal take on the banal belies The Royle Family's reputation as a programme where nothing ever happens. Maybe it is just us watching them watching TV, but the show's transformation of base human behaviour into comedy gold is nothing short of a phenomenon.
Meet the family: Jim, the father, ex of Brookside is a surprisingly Scouse voice in this resolutely Manchester programme. Fat, ugly, idle, offensive, and bullying, he is characterised by regular grunts of "My arse" towards anything or anybody who doesn't fit into the narrow parameters of his chairbound life. Barbara, the mother, also ex of Brookside is your archetypal North of England mother: long-suffering, neglected and worked like a skivvy. She's also going through the menopause but nobody cares. Grandmother Nanna is a regular visitor to the Royle household: she's developed an acute addiction to daytime television shows, displays a fascination with her bowel movements and has problems with her cataracts - which she never shuts up about.
Denise is the daughter - she's not overly encumbered by any form of intellectual activity and her world is book-ended by Hello magazine and The Gerry Springer Show. Whingy, manipulative and quite bitchy when she wants to be, she is using her pregnancy to make the world revolve around her. She's married to Dave, one of TV's great gormless characters. He's pathetically stupid but oddly charming in his own moronic way. Antony is Denise's younger brother. He is simultaneously embarrassed and amused by his family. Seemingly the only one who ever takes a step outside the door, he had a brief career as the manager of a rock band (albeit for 24 hours) and he's now going out with a posh, middle class girl who is an endless source of fascination for the Royle family - mainly because she's a vegetarian.
Written by Denise (Caroline Aherne, aka Mrs Merton) and Dave (Craig Cash), this not-so-everyday tale of a Manchester working class family first aired on BBC2 in September 1998, but not before the actors baulked at the scripts handed to them. When Ricky Tomlinson (Jim) read through the first episode in rehearsals, he said to the rest of the cast: "We'll either win the comedy of the year award or get thrown in jail for doing a programme like this." With no laugh track, no punch-lines and no real plotline, The Royle Family was an unlikely sounding sitcom when it first went out. Coming over more like a Alan Sillitoe or Ken Loach drama-documentary about working class life, it took time to sink in with viewers. Nothing really happened, the family just sat there crumpled up together on the couch watching hideous television programmes and exchanging idle banter.
Over the course of the first series though, it became clear that Aherne and Cash were succeeding in their aim of making a comedy programme about "real people doing real things". Transferred to BBC1 for the second series, it soon notched up 10 million viewers. Jim's catchphrase of "My Arse" was quickly replacing "Suits you sir" in school playgrounds and university campuses and the critics gushed about how it was "ever so naturalistic".
Little did they know that The Royle Family was in fact the autobiographical recollections of a first-generation Irish woman, who transcribed whole passages of dialogue from her Irish parents onto the script pages of the show. "When the very first one went out, I remember my mother ringing me afterwards" says Aherne, "she said it was really good and then she said how funny it was that The Royle Family on the television behaved just like our family did when we were growing up".
One of the most pivotal figures in comedy over the last five years, whether through her work on The Mrs Merton Show, the spin-off Mrs Merton and Malcom, The Fast Show and now The Royle Family, Caroline Aherne (37) was brought up in Manchester, the only daughter of West of Ireland parents. The family lived in a council estate in the Wythenshawe area, with her father working on the railways and her mother working as a schools dinner lady. Not so many streets away, other Irish parents included Mr and Mrs Gallagher (sons: Noel and Liam) and Mr and Mrs Morrissey (son: Stephen Patrick Morrissey). Caroline and her brother, Patrick, both suffered from a rare cancer of the retina and while Patrick had to have his right eye removed, Caroline kept hers but is practically blind in one eye.
Academically very bright (something she always self-consciously disguises in interviews), Aherne took a drama degree in Liverpool before getting work in the BBC Manchester office as a secretary. Enchanted by the "alternative" comedy boom in the late 1980s, she put her degree to some use by appearing in stand-up clubs in the guise of "Sister Mary Immaculata" (a demented Irish nun, who advised girls to walk home alone in the dark rather than with their boyfriends - "sure it's a bigger sin if you're raped by someone you know"). She teamed up with Craig Cash (who she met while working for a local radio station) to write some comedy sketches for a local Granada television show before busting out with her Mrs Merton Show.
Her TV profile coupled with her marriage to rock star Peter Hook (from New Order) prompted plenty of tabloid interest in her life. After divorcing Cook, she went out with Matt Bowers, a TV producer, who died of cancer shortly after Aherne finished the relationship. Her drinking instead of her love life soon became the new focus of attention, but in July 1998, after taking an overdose of champagne and pills she booked herself into London's Priory Clinic for a spell of rehab.
Aherne was determined to come back from "My Rehab Hell" with her strongest ever programme. By delving deep back into her Irish Catholic upbringing on a Manchester council estate, she remembered how her family used to sit around watching television all the time . . .
The Royle Family is on BBC1 on December 25th at 10.30 p.m.