Everyone Else Burns review: It's full of hit and miss one-liners

(L-R) Simon Bird as David and Kadiff Kirwan as Andrew in Everyone Else Burns (Picture: James Stack)

Rachel is asleep on her school desk. Her brilliantly no-BS teacher wakes her with news of a B minus. ‘Would have been higher, but I reserve As for students who remain conscious,’ she smiles. Rachel’s explanation? ‘Dad got me up at 4am to do apocalypse practice.’

And he had; David (Simon Bird with a literal pudding bowl haircut) has indoctrinated his family into the ways of a minority Christian sect who aren’t allowed Coca-Cola or mobile phones – but believe the Reckoning is imminent.

He gathers his family to the hills above Manchester for an early-morning run-through, Rachel’s kid brother Aaron complaining he’s hungry as he trudges up the slopes.

‘You get biscuits after the moon’s turned to blood,’ says the man running to be an elder in the Order of The Divine Rod. And that, God help us, is about as funny as new sitcom Everyone Else Burns gets.

Written by Dillon Mapletoft and Oliver Taylor, the set-up is promising; a combination of Rev’s gentle observational comedy about religion and – with Bird being the obvious connection – The Inbetweeners’ piercing of teenage life in suburbia.

But David’s hit and miss one-liners – you can almost see the tumbleweed blowing across set for some of them – make him out to be a ridiculous, even irritating Partridge-esque oddball, not someone who could ever have been an overbearing patriarch.

The Inbetweeners actor stars in the new Channel 4 comedy (Picture: James Stack)

Partridge worked because there was a semblance of truth in the excruciating embarrassment.

Here, this world never feels remotely convincing.

Still, the developing story over these six episodes is how his grip on his family way of life is gradually loosening, his wife Fiona (the excellently buttoned-up Kate O’Flynn), and children all coming of age in different ways.

And actually, as the rest of the family find their way to a kind of real-life enlightenment without him, there’s something rather sweet about Rachel’s developing relationship with Joel (Ladhood’s Liam Williams), which Gentleman Jack’s Amy-James Kelly imbues with real yearning.

Flynn, too, superbly bounces off her mischievous, non-religious neighbour (Morgana Robinson) on her road to, well, fun.

It’s telling that Robinson’s quips are probably the funniest in the show, operating as she does outside of the construct of this awkward world.

An uneven sitcom, then, which will require real faith to finish.

Everybody Else Burns is on Channel 4 and All 4.

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