Overlooked Classics: Flowers (Series 1, 2016)

‘ You Don’t…Shoot… Family. Everyone knows that! “

Imagine if Wes Anderson made work that was manic depressive instead of…well, just manic. That’s halfway to understanding the delightfully warped, hermetically – sealed world of Flowers.

Whitten by, directed by and starring Will Sharpe, the programme is wonderful, holding up well after nearly a decade, with a sort of small-town magick at its core and a soupcon of hauntology. Sadcom doesn’t quite cut it.

Olivia Coleman, wonderful as ever, portrays Deborah Flowers, a sexually frustrated, perma-chirpy music teacher whose cardigans wear her. Husband Maurice (Julian Barratt) is a depressed writer, almost pathologically misanthropic.

Their adult offspring are no less bizarre: Amy (Sophia Di Martino) and Donald (Daniel Rigby), the former a rural Nico who makes gloomy classical music no-one listens to; the latter, an inventor whose prototypes are wildly impractical.

Throw into the mix Shun (Sharpe himself) a strange Japanese loner with a predilection for creating perverse anime, and an assortment of dysfunctional neighbours, and it’s bible black humour bordering on bleak, but always wilfully misdirecting the viewer. It’s perfectly pitched between existential despair and farcical mishap, although better and more subtle than that sounds. There are also deep interludes of hallucinatory beauty.

I see the autumnal melancholy of Nick Drake and Bagpuss in its DNA; Richard Ayoade’s excellent Submarine, and the films of Ben Wheatley. I like work with characters that exist in their own bubble. It’s strange, hilarious and moving, as apposite a metaphor for the unravelling caused by Brexit as I’ve ever seen on the small screen.