Yahoo News Kate and Koji review: Unfunny, uninspired, oppressive propaganda
“Kate, the owner of an old-fashioned seaside cafe, forms an unlikely friendship with Koji, an African asylum seeker.” Terrible idea for a comedy, I thought when I glanced at the show’s TV listing – and I am sorry to say that Kate and Koji lives down to those low expectations.
It is unfunny, uninspired and unworthy of Hat Trick productions, who made it, and ITV, who made the misjudgement of broadcasting it. It might improve, but I have to say I would not be surprised if it was pulled before the end of its six-week run.
Well, I say a terrible idea, but it can work – as it did in Home, about a Syrian asylum seeker who smuggled himself into the car boot, and then the home, of a nice couple in Dorking. You might remember that one, because it was witty and inventive and amusing – sensitive territory carefully traversed.
So there’s nothing wrong with the basic set-up. Nor is there anything wrong with the talented actors assembled to try to bring the sitcom to life. Brenda Brethyn (Kate), Jimmy Akingbola (Koji, the asylum-seeking doctor), Barbara Flynn (a busybody councillor) and Blake Harrison (nephew of Kate and cafe habitue) do their very best with the material, but, in the end, can’t save it.
For a start, it is basically agitprop, and of a crudity that would be regarded as a touch heavy-handed even in a Momentum cell or a state-run theatre in Pyongyang. I’m all in favour of welcoming into Britain asylum seekers desperate for their lives, and regard the government’s indifference to their plight and the media’s demonisation of them as pretty sickening. But nothing could justify the clunking, grinding, oppressive propaganda that passes for dialogue here.
The worst of an especially bad sequence establishing the fact that Koji can’t practice as a doctor because of the silly asylum rules is when he reveals that he receives just £37.75 per week in social security. It has to cover all of his needs. “What, you mean £5.55 per day for everything?” immediately pipes up the nephew, just as people don’t. That’s in response to Kate declaring that this polite man is “taking our money”, an act of outright rudeness that also illegally crosses the border of audience credulity. An inordinate amount of time is also spent on public spending cuts to the police and the NHS, a couple of predictable gags about the royal family and “BBC vegan propaganda”.
It isn’t much that it’s all so political, or even that it’s so badly disguised, but that it isn’t actually in any way funny or satirical or thought-provoking. That is not forgivable. Apparently it was performed in front of a live studio audience, but the sound dubbing is so poor that you’d never believe it. There are some sound effects of seagulls that are almost comically played in – the funniest thing in the show.
Anyway, Kate and Koji eventually end up in an arrangement whereby she gives him free food and operates an informal GP surgery on the cafe, attracting the paying consumers that Kate’s struggling cafe so badly needs to stay in business (because they can’t get an appointment with their own GP, obvs). If it were real life, I’d be heartened by this symbiotic relationship, but it is not. That it is the premise for a “comedy” is the worst news since Donald Trump got in.
Those responsible for this debacle – Andy Hamilton, Guy Jenkin and Debs Pisani – could surely do better than this?
‘Kate & Koji’ continues on ITV at 8pm on Wednesday 25 March
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