When Mel Smith died last year, his sad passing did have one small silver lining: 26 years after it aired, his underrated and oft-forgotten sitcom was finally been released on DVD. A relatively fresh-faced Smith, who had made his name with the era-defining Not The Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith & Jones, plays Colin Watkins, a beleaguered British Rail clerk who spends all day listening to customer complaints, daydreaming about becoming a bestselling horror writer as he eats his depressing packed lunch. Real life invariably gets in the way – at first, anyway.
Thanks to its shabby, semi-suburban London setting and Smith’s lugubrious looks, Colin’s Sandwich was dubbed “Hancock for the 80s”. His bulldog face appears in almost every frame and his performance is superbly nuanced: misanthropic but lovable, arrogant but vulnerable, slobbish but sympathetic. We hear Colin’s internal monologues, he breaks the fourth wall, and is prone to Reggie Perrin-style flights of fancy. The script is smart, too, and dotted with flashes of slapstick, from our hero struggling to stifle a yawn during a moving heart-to-heart, or retrieving a dead cat from inside a bottle bank.
Part of the show’s charm is how evocatively 1980s it is. Women with big hair and shoulderpads are bought Frascati and Beaujolais by besuited men. Yuppies have bulging Filofaxes, go for “jazz brunches” in wine bars and say “Ciao”. Social lives seem to revolve around dinner parties, where the menu involves chicken fricassee and Black Forest gateau. Colin’s kitchen has a hatch, he sets his VHS timer for BBC2 documentaries, and sleeps under a red duvet with diagonal stripes. He cracks jokes about Raisa Gorbachev, Millwall hooligans and the EEC butter mountain. There are also wince-worthy reminders of those less enlightened times: Colin’s laddish colleagues go out for a “chinky”, and when he orders Perrier in a pub (rather than his usual Lowenbrau or Pernod and black), he’s a “bloody poof”.
It’s reminiscent of other comedies of the period, notably Ever Decreasing Circles, Just Good Friends and – thanks to Smith’s relish for verbose rants and rolling words round his mouth – A Bit of Fry and Laurie. On Smith’s Eeyorish lips, the names of railway stations become almost poetic: Theydon Bois, Gidea Park, Ponders End, Leighton Buzzard. Familiar faces such as Lindsay Duncan, Annette Crosbie, Frazz from Press Gang and Stewpot from Grange Hill pop up, looking so young you do a double-take.
Yet Colin’s Sandwich is also timeless. The gaffe-prone anti-hero with thwarted ambitions is, after all, a sitcom staple that served Basil Fawlty, Del Boy and David Brent well. It’s an acute portrait of an aspiring writer, too. Colin toils over his typewriter long into the night, convinced he’s an undiscovered genius, but terrified when someone actually discovers him. He’s paranoid about missing phonecalls, fluffing meetings, and anguishes over whether manuscripts have been received, let alone read. He basks in praise, bristles at criticism, over-celebrates successes, panics at failures and wallows self-pityingly when he gets writer’s block. It can be touching too, not least when his father’s death sends him into a tailspin.
Although Colin’s Sandwich lasted a mere 12 episodes in two series, it covered a lot of ground. We see Colin get a story published, trade in his red Ford Fiesta for a blue Ford Granada, and even write a screenplay. Or try to. But will he ever fulfil his dreams – and become “a proper, professional writer” with a word processor and answerphone? You’ll need to peep into Colin’s Sandwich to find out.
