After You've Gone (TV Series) Stuck in the Middle with You (2007) User Reviews

Fab start

[studioAT · 7/10 · 25 April 2020]

Fred Barron (the excellent 'Caroline in the City') tried to re-create the success of his previous BBC sitcom hit 'My Family' with this stellar (and sadly short-lived) comedy, starring sitcom legends Nicholas Lyndhurst (Only Fools) and Celia Imrie (Dinnerladies).

Sitcom pilots rearely reflect the show at its best, but this episode does a really good job of setting up the characters/premise.

With some classic Barron lines (he wrote this episode) and lovely chemistry between the cast (not to mention a potential break out star in Ryan Sampson) this is a good start indeed.

Alone with your mother-in-law

[iph-1 · 5/10 · 13 January 2007]

Here we have Nicholas Lyndhurst as Jimmy, a painter, decorator & odd-job man, the divorced father of a teenage boy & girl whose nurse mother Ann goes off to Africa (with doctor boyfriend, we gather) to help after a disaster and asks her ex to move back into her house to look after those teenagers. Ann also asks her mother, Diana Neal (Celia Imrie), to move in; so the central comic couple (heavily emphasized mutual hatred) are Imrie & Lyndhurst.

The young Ryan Sampson (who seemed to be playing about 13) was quite funny too, brashly doing bizarre things; Harmer played the script's standard stroppy teenage schoolgirl well enough. Sadly, episode 1 descended very quickly to continual insult exchanges, and the sort of plot with everyone always incompetent, and everything going too-coincidentally wrong (Jimmy found himself in jail over a parking ticket) and I got tired of this half way through and gave up.