Combining the suburban anti-glamour of Stath Lets Flats with the comforting narrative beats of a classic sitcom, Sky Max’s new comedy Mr Bigstuff is the TV series version of its leading man, Danny Dyer – loud and silly with a surprisingly soft heart. Touching on toxic masculinity and broken families, it follows two brothers reconnecting after years of estrangement.
Dyer plays alpha male Lee Campbell as a caricature of himself. A truly 2024 geezer, swilling lager while lecturing binmen about the environment, Lee barrelled back into his estranged brother Glen’s comparatively boring life like a sweary bull in a beige china shop. Ostensibly, he is on the trail of family friend Steve Drummond (Geoff Bell) and while after two episodes his precise motives are still opaque, there is clearly more at stake than simply rekindling old friendships.
Glen – played by Ryan Sampson, the series’ writer and creator – is the polar opposite of his colourful brother. Before Lee appeared, Glen’s main preoccupations were getting a promotion at the Leyton carpet showroom where he worked and tending to his lukewarm relationship with fiancée Kirsty (Harriet Webb) as their wedding approached.
Mr Bigstuff quickly establishes comic tension, overlaying the squirming monotony of Kirsty and Glen’s life – “pop your penis away, Glen,” sighs Kirsty, after an aborted hand job in a Halfords car park – with Lee’s chaos. Eventually invited to stay with the couple, Lee sets about finding Drummond and swaggering around in Kirsty’s floral dressing gown and sunglasses – eccentricities that gloss over somewhat incongruous character development.
Charisma rolls off Dyer in waves – just as well, because something has to compensate for Lee’s muddled motivations. Hyper-macho and bristling with cockney bloke-isms, yet performatively socially aware (“it’s ‘sex worker’, [not ‘prostitute’]”, he corrects Glen), Lee embodies a vanishingly specific brand of masculinity – you could call it conflicted, or you could call it incoherent. Lecturing people on politically correct terminology one minute, then squaring up to someone the next, the character teeters near the brink of baffling – Dyer might have made Lee watchable, but I don’t yet feel clear about who he is, and I’m not sure his writer does, either.
But while Lee is painted in broad strokes, Kirsty gets more three-dimensional by the minute – Webb’s taut keeping-up-with-the-Joneses façade, peeling at the edges, is masterful. Returning home unexpectedly one lunchtime, Glen finds her scrolling on her phone in bed rather than at work – and although she quickly makes up a story (“there was a gas leak, in the whole office!”) her rictus grin indicates something else.
When she bumps into an ex-colleague, we learn that Kirsty has been suspended from her job – something Glen knows nothing about. The women’s saccharine interaction, loaded with backhanded barbs – “A lot of stuff did go missing… I just hope you’re OK” – was delightfully tense, and ultimately humiliating for Kirsty when a tube of lipstick she’d pocketed rolled across the floor.
Less nuanced, the gulf between assertive Lee and timid Glen begins to look dangerously teachable as the show goes on. “When are you going to stop letting people treat you like fucking shit?”, Lee says to his brother when they’d been sat at an undesirable restaurant table. Will the tearaway’s confidence and the church mouse’s calm rub off on each other? Yawn. Fingers crossed we don’t devolve into cheesy life lessons – while Mr Bigstuff is already signposting its trajectory, it doesn’t yet feel predictable.
In its first two episodes, Mr Bigstuff is at its funniest delivering social awkwardness – Kirsty’s attempts to shoehorn a story about her husband taking charge of a neighbourhood litter pick (“if that’s not an example of, um, real leadership capabilities…”) into conversation with Glen’s boss made me laugh out loud. Meanwhile, flashes of human interest elevate it above the usual sitcom fare.
Despite its flaws, Mr Bigstuff has the makings of something both funny and feel-good – for those who can forgive its sillier bits, the pay-off is, as Lee would probably say, pukka.
‘Mr Bigstuff’ continues next Wednesday at 9pm on Sky Max