This gentle, truthful, beautifully performed comedy about the ultimate beta male is painful in its accuracy – and will speak to so many of us
Jonathan (played by Romesh Ranganathan) is a beta male. Or, if you want to be more polite, an everyman. We can’t call him the hero of Ranganathan’s new six-part comedy series, Avoidance (BBC One), co-written with Benjamin Green, because that would be a contradiction in terms. But he is its protagonist and it is he who must find a new way of doing, living and being when his partner Claire (Jessica Knappett), driven to breaking point by his eternal inertia, finally throws him out.
It is a triumph of characterisation and writing that by the end of the opening minutes – during which Claire repeatedly insists, in a conversation they have clearly had before, that she and Jonathan must separate and he must leave – you are firmly on her side. “It. Is. Over,” she says. “I get it. I get it,” says Jonathan at last. Then, in a masterpiece of passive resistance that would see a lesser woman kill, “Let’s see how we feel after the dust settles.”
