Couples’ in-jokes are so irritating. Not so in Colin from Accounts

I realise this says more about me, but my instinctive response to hearing about a real-life couple doing a comedy show together is usually a rapid sinking of the heart. It’s a scepticism born of too many evenings with coupled-up friends who collapse into spasms of laughter every time someone says “couscous”, and then pretend-apologise by exchanging a special glance and saying: “Sorry, it’s hard to explain, it’s just… we have a thing about couscous.” Yes, hilarious.

Frequently, what couples find funny together fails to translate outside that context, and can often feel exclusionary – which, after all, is the point of a private joke: this is our thing, you wouldn’t get it because you weren’t there. So the prospect of that in sitcom form doesn’t inspire confidence.

But my cynicism has been utterly disarmed by Colin from Accounts, the Australian comedy series scripted and performed by husband and wife Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer. Even the discovery that the couple had a rescue dog they named Colin from Accounts in real life has done nothing to dampen my love for it. Part of the show’s magic is its blending of a very British-flavoured awkwardness with Aussie bluntness; it’s no surprise to learn that one of their inspirations was Fawlty Towers, the brainchild of another real-life couple, John Cleese and Connie Booth. Crucially, Cleese and Booth didn’t play a couple; rather than a love interest, Booth’s Polly was firmly in the commedia dell’arte tradition of the clever servant who outwits her master, and the on-screen chemistry between them was of a sparring kind.

Indeed, any suggestion of sexual tension between Basil and Polly would have killed the comedy – partly because one of Basil’s defining traits is his aversion to anything of that nature, but also because sexual tension isn’t very funny. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that comedy immediately punctures sexual tension. Awkwardness and embarrassment around sex and bodies – now those are funny, and Brammall and Dyer make the most of this by rooting the intentions of their characters, Gordon and Ashley, in physical comedy around bodily functions.

There’s a reason why marriages are central to so many sitcoms; there’s huge scope for humour in the day-to-day irritations and disgruntlement that are immediately relatable to the audience. It’s a formula that has worked brilliantly for comedians Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont, whose mockumentary about life as a celeb couple, Meet the Richardsons, is on its fourth season, and Chris and Rosie Ramsey, whose podcast Shagged Married Annoyed has been turned into a live tour and a BBC chat show. As with Colin from Accounts, the success of these shows is down to the couples in question nailing the alchemy required to turn private jokes into relatable stories – and, crucially, laughing at themselves and each other.

It’s also down to finding that rare combination of a couple who are funny individually, but even funnier together. Nowhere is that truer than in the case of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who dated only briefly before going on as Nichols and May to become arguably the greatest male-female double act of all time. Perhaps married-couple energy is a state of mind. Either way, it’s clear that the combined talents of Brammall and Dyer have revived a well-worn format. Let’s hope Colin from Accounts, unlike a pair belonging to its canine co-star, has legs.

• Stephanie Merritt’s latest novel is Storm

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