Radio Times Listings & Newspaper Reviews
Pilot Episode
Episode One
Episode Two
Episode Three
Episode Four
Episode Five
Episode Six
Episode One
Episode Two
Episode Three
Episode Four
Episode Five
Episode Six
(First broadcast 7th January 1993; against Minder on ITV)
Radio Times 2nd-8th January 1993
I don’t want to get prematurely excited, but BBC2’s Joking Apart is distinctly promising as “a new adult comedy series”.
In other words, this is middle-class sit-com with sex and mild swear-words. Gosh! It took the trenchant Drop the Dead Donkey to show what really happened after office parties (you wake up with your face in a curry at a railway station).
Steven Moffat’s Joking Apart hardly aspires to the standards of the divine DTDD, but as an analysis of modern divorce it’s quite funny and acute so far. Robert Bathurst and Fiona Gillies are much too pretty and clean to be entirely true to life, but maybe separation will roughen them up.
And it contains invaluable advice to dunderheads. Start suspecting something’s wrong if the wife/husband begins to move items of furniture out of the marital home. She/he’s nesting elsewhere.
I know someone who only realised that all was not well with his marriage when his wife tried to move him out of the marital home.
Maureen Paton – Daily Express, 8th January 1993
I’ve virtually given up looking for a good new British sitcom; they’re all too bland, heavy-handed and frankly unfunny. Joking Apart (BBC2) has its problems but possesses a certain dark, mordant wit. It deals with a TV comedy writer called Mark, who doubles as a stand-up comic – an excruciatingly bad one, to judge by last night’s samples. His new wife, Becky, swiftly asks for a divorce when it becomes apparent that Mark ignores her, treats every situation as fodder for his comedy material, and is generally a selfish prat.
Last night’s episode had a good sequence: a dinner party with a couple of Becky’s staid friends, the sort of people who say things like ‘there’s never enough cupboard space’. Mark’s cruelty towards them was devastating and funny.
But the show has a huge casting problem. Robert Bathurst, as Mark, is a conventionally handsome actor, but not one who can successfully convey the frustration of being a creative writer; he looks too blank for that. The exquisite Fiona Gillies, on the other hand, hits just the right note as the understandably impatient Becky.
Writer Steven Moffat could make Joking Apart a halfway decent comedy as long as he keeps the humour and the situations acerbic; a cosy little situation comedy about a divorced couple who are still (nudge-nudge) crazy about each other is something we could all live without.
David Gritten - The Daily Telegraph, 8th January 1993

Webmaster's comment: I can't help but feel that the reviewer's criticism of Robert Bathurst is both rather hasty and less than generous. Steven Moffat, the writer of the series, was instrumental in the casting of Robert, and if anyone should be able to judge whether or not an actor is able to convey a writer's sense of frustration, it's Steven. Besides, the series was never about the pain of writing; it was about the pain of divorce, which Robert carries off brilliantly.