Stath Lets Flats, Jamie Demetriou’s brilliant series about the off-the-wall, loveable agents at Michael and Eagle Lettings won the Bafta for Best Scripted Comedy last year – beating Catastrophe, Derry Girls and Fleabag. After a long break, its silly yet heartfelt return last night proved it’s still the daftest show on television.
The show picked up nine months after the series two finale, with Carole (Katy Wix) about to give birth to Stath’s (Demetriou) baby at any moment. While he could barely contain his excitement, it wasn’t exactly good timing – Michael and Eagle had been forced to relocate to his father’s (Christos Stergioglou) house and, until they convinced their landlords to stick with them and found another office, they couldn’t pay anyone.
So began Stath’s quest to get a new “park time” job at his cousin’s barbers. But the story and the set-piece jokes – Stath enjoyed romantically cutting the hair of his colleague and “mayor of gentleman town”, Al (Al Roberts) – weren’t
the draw.
Rather, it was the well-defined characters and their loveable, idiosyncratic quirks that made the return to Stath’s innocent world such a delight.
Sophie (Natasia Demetriou) was writing her own screenplay “just about a woman who’s lost her goddamn mind”, which she later performed for a nonplussed Dean (Kiell Smith-Bynoe); Carole, exasperated but resplendent in her skirt suit and Ugg boots, was constantly speaking on her Bluetooth headphones trying to save the agency.
The climax came when Carole went into labour and, naturally, decided to drive herself to the hospital. After a quick trip to get a “textbook bottle of water”, which resulted in Stath going to three different corner shops and asking “bossman” to get him “a sketchbook and some water”, they ended up at Dean’s aunt’s house where Carole gave birth to Stath’s baby girl, Dina.
Despite some excellent physical comedy from Demetriou, it was a tender moment amid the chaos.
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