Edinburgh Fringe shows inflated to six 30-minute episodes. The vogue in TV comedy at the moment, of course, is for thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-pieces.
Not a thinly fictionalised semi-autobiographical warts-and-all think-piece. Not a first-person confessional diatribe. Now, yes, I must admit that the first joke in the third series – and the first of many, many belly laughs – is Stath forgetting the name “Bernard” and coming up with “Gernold”, and the central gag throughout is that everyone in the show is some shade of stupid, but Stath Lets Flats trounces the competition by the sheer fact that it has the guts to be a comedy. It’s the most cerebral, emotional and subtle comedy on TV. Think that, however, and Demetriou has sucker punched you all. Perhaps it doesn’t pull in the viewing figures because people write it off as jolly slapstick or awkward cringe comedy or zany pratfalls or crude clowning. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, to put it another way – if a sitcom wins three Baftas, and no one watches it, is it a comedy classic? In the case of Stath Lets Flats (Channel 4), Jamie Demetriou’s oddball sitcom about an inept Greek-Cypriot lettings agent in north London, undoubtedly so.
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