Hold the Sunset, episode one, review: John Cleese’s big sitcom return fizzes with comic energy

It is 43 years since John Cleese last appeared in a BBC sitcom. You may remember it – hotel in Torquay, rude owner, hapless staff. Fawlty Towers only ran for 12 episodes in the Seventies but no British sitcom has ever had quite the same cultural impact. As Shane Allen, the BBC’s head of comedy commissioning, put it when he announced Cleese’s return: “His last one did alright.”

It certainly did. But those hoping for something similar to Fawlty Towers will have been surprised by Hold the Sunset (BBC One), a defiantly unflashy comedy, whose first episode took place mostly in a nondescript kitchen in suburbia. There was so little action, it would have worked perfectly well as a radio play. And yet, with a first-rate cast led by Cleese and Alison Steadman, reuniting on screen 32 years after starring as husband and wife in Clockwise, as well as a cracking script by Monty Python collaborator Charles McKeown, it fizzed with comic energy.

Cleese plays Phil, a widower whose friendship with Edith (Steadman), a widow who lives across the road, has very quietly developed into something more. There was a tenderness to the way they interacted, and hints of a shared melancholy. Their mutual affection was never overstated, just a gentle touch of the elbow here or a fond admonishment there. “Oh, shut up and have a biscuit,” Edith said to Phil after he made a clumsy, harmless pass at breakfast.

But just as they finally decided to get married, Edith’s 50-year-old son Roger (Jason Watkins) turned up out of the blue and announced that he had left his wife and was moving back in with his mum. Phil was put out by this. 

Cleese is made for this role. Throughout this opener, he perfectly conveyed the widower’s irritation without ever allowing it to tip over into malice. He moved creakily across the screen, his joints seemingly powered by his growls. “Back trouble?” asked Roger. “No, no, no, that’s the least of my worries,” replied Phil in a way that was at once curmudgeonly and mischievous. 

Edith, meanwhile, found that her frustration at Roger’s arrival was no match for her maternal love. As the four childish self-portraits hanging in pride of place on the kitchen wall testified, she would always, first and foremost, be a mother. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she sighed on Roger’s return. And deep down, you sensed that Phil understood. 

This was one of those wonderful programmes about everything and nothing – love, getting on with getting on, and simply taking a deep breath and adjusting as best you can when things don’t quite turn out the way you’d hoped. Who can’t relate to that?