Put This In Your Pipe And Smoke It (The Smoking Room)

Member Name: W Shakespeare

Product:	The Smoking Room
Date:	01/08/05 (388 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The characters make you feel like you're a workaholic

Disadvantages: Smoking can seriously damage your health

The Smoking Room has coughed and spluttered its way to a second series, after wafting onto our screens in the summer 2004.

Having graduated from the Beeb’s comedy crèche, BBC Three to BBC 2, good old Auntie is continuing to air new episodes on its digital channel, if only to encourage people to buy that little black box and get freeview.

This is a show which bucks political correctness and portrays nicotine addicts in their element. ‘Hooray!’ all you smokers shout. ‘Don’t encourage them!’ cough the rest of us.

The show is a producer’s dream – all the action takes place in a dingy smoking room in an anonymous office about which we know nothing (‘shop talk’ is banned). As a refuge from the daily drudgery of nine-to-five, it attracts a wide range of characters from across the shop floor.

The central character is Robin (played by Robert Webb from Channel Four's 'Peep Show') who is secretly gay and dreams of spending the rest of his life with Ben in the post room - who we never see – and he hates his job with a passion, taking any opportunity to nip off for a crafty fag. However, despite regular funny lines, he is a little one-dimensional.

There is the emotional wreck Annie, who believes she was Marie Antoinette in a previous life (the show’s website lists her greatest achievement as ‘ruling the whole of France’) and loves anything to do with auras or crystals. Her long-suffering friend Sally is a blunt, aggressive pitbull of a woman but, again, there isn’t much else to her. Then there is paranoid Barry the crossword king and Lilian (played by Paula Wilcox who older readers will remember from 1970's sitcom 'Man About The House'), who is the wrong side of 50 and loves to be the subject of scandal and gossip, as well as the mind-numbingly tedious Heidi.

Security guard Len is over-done with liberal sprinklings of the ‘f-word’. Swearing can help to make a gag, but this character’s antics can actually make you cringe as it all seems so forced.

The three best characters are Clint, the spaced-out odd-job-man who is the source of many of the laughs, prim school swot Janet who tries desperately to engender some enthusiasm amongst the troops and her frosty boss Sharon.

The single location, when added to the rather plodding pace of the show, can make the action seem to drag (no pun intended) in much the same way that the characters’ working days appear to do. As an asthmatic non-smoker, I have never had the pleasure of entering such a den of iniquity, but you get the feeling the ‘Smoking Room’ almost depicts it too well i.e. you start to feel as bored as some of the characters after a while.

Together the characters discuss everything from the banal to the bizarre, with constant interruptions from Janet and Sharon.

The episodes in the first series focused on a strange and eclectic range of issues, including; what was the theme tune to The Little House On The Prairie?, a doomed paintballing excursion, no-one having a light for a foreign visitor’s cigarette and Valentine’s Day.

If you were being generous, and keeping up the smoking theme, you could say that this sitcom is a slow-burner and will soon be discussed around leaky water-coolers up and down the country. If you were being less than generous, you might point out that this series came soon after ‘The Office’ and has little hope of generating a substantial audience. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Oddly, the first series is not available on DVD, but the BBC has produced an audio CD of all the shows. This really underlines the fact that there isn’t much visual action, but it will undoubtedly appeal to afficionados. It costs about the same as 4 packets of fags.

If you want to know more about the show, you can access detailed episode and character guides, clips and other goodies on its website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/smokingroom

As the last wisps of white smoke circle around the ceiling, I’ll stub out this review and clear my lungs. <CLEARS THROAT> That’s better.

Summary: A comedy about work-shy smokers