Cuckoo turned out to be the comedy hit of the year, when it aired in autumn 2012. Fronted by the man mountain comedy might of Greg Davies (Inbetweeners Movie) and featuring a cast that includes the annoying woman from Friends and one of the annoying kids from Outnumbered it’s an alternative sit-com gem that world a hell of a lot more than it sounds.
The title comes from the new-age hippie son-in-law that Ken (Davies) acquires when his daughter Rachel returns from her gap year in Thailand. Preachy, self inflated and annoying beyond believe, Cuckoo’s Yankee spiritualised tendencies grate on Ken instantly, leading to a lot of great comedy wrangling, miscommunication and crack pot situations.
Worse still, Rachel and Cuckoo have decided that they’ll be living with their parents, now that they’ve finished their holiday, meaning that Ken has got to put up with it under his own roof, including their frequent, rampant and vocally passionate love acrobatics. It all makes for a lot of good fun, with outlandish humour mixing in well with subtler notes of sarcasm and self deprecation.
Helen Bexendale (Friends, Cold Feet) plays mum Lorna with a cheeky carefree attitude that exacerbates Ken’s annoyance, as well as making her much more likeable than she’s ever been before. However, it hangs together around the hippy sensibilities of Cuckoo, played by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), whose quest to save the world from the back of a potato van is the perfect foil for Greg Davies’ comedy.
Ken’s daughter Rachel is played perfectly by Tamla Kari, who starred alongside Greg in The Inbetweeners Movie, as she manages to pull off being his little girl, while also being absolutely besotted by Cuckoo and his alternative outlook on life. Her devious, girl obsessed younger brother Dylan is played equally well by Outnubered‘s Tyger Drew-Honey and he brings a very cynical brand of humour to the show.
Cuckoo inevitably gets pretty far fetched at times, but that takes nothing away from a great new sitcom with a mad cap storyline. It finished airing on BBC3 at the end of 2013 and all six episodes of Series 1 are now unavailable on BBC iPlayer. However, they are available on DVD or digital download if you want to catch up.
Greg has already been nominated for a BAFTA as Best Male Performance In A Comedy Programme for Cuckoo, which goes some way to highlighting how good the comedy is. The debut was subsequently followed up in 2014 with Series 2 and it’s recently been announced that Cuckoo Series 3 will air in 2015. You can catch even more of the big guy in his other recent sitcom, Channel 4’s Man Down.
Cuckoo Series 1 review: 4/5
