The Irish Times – 16th February 2013

 

Bernice Harrison

 

New comedy is rich with dark comic potential and the acting is spot on – especially from Barbara Bergin.

 

New Irish comedy. Now there are three words to make your blood run cold. But On The Couch (TV3, Tuesday) is funny – and not in a good-for-an-Irish-comedy sort of way but properly funny.

 

It is a simple one-camera, single location set-up – I’m guessing the budget was two washers and a jam jar – and Barbara Bergin and Gary Cooke (from Apres Match) not only wrote the script but play all six characters.

 

The couch is in a therapist’s office, and the action intercuts the sessions of three couples in crisis. There’s newly posh but dead rough Dubliners Dudley and Sylvia – he’s in “security, the solutions business” – who are trying to move on from his mindless affair with a young one; flinty workaholics Graeme – in “financial services and a humanitarian” – and Moya, who are trying to prove they are good parents after their 14 year old was taken into care after a drunken assault (“they say the other boy was brain damaged; well then, he won’t remember what happened, will he?”); and anorak-wearing Brendan, who can’t come to terms with his meek wife Carmel’s weight loss. “Change only causes people anxiety and stress. I don’t know why people have to change,” he harrumphs, not missing the chance to undermine her achievement.

 

Each story is rich with blackly comic potential. The acting is spot on, especially from Bergin, who is a terrific character actor; and the writing is subtle enough that by the end of the first episode the dynamics between the couples have shifted – and look to shift again next week. You mightn’t recognise everything in all the characters, but they seem very real all the same.