Some shows never have the chance to ‘Jump the Shark’. That fateful moment where a tonal shift or more usually, a dip in quality, is felt by the audience. Derived from an episode in Happy Days where the Fonz inexplicably jumps over a shark while on water skis, the expression is used most often to reflect a symptom of a show’s success and therefore longevity.
A sitcom may have existed for so long that the writers got increasingly desperate in their search for plots, or they have moved the characters so far on from their origins that they no longer possess the essence that made them so appealing to viewers in the first place.
Very often jumping the shark can be spotted through the characters’ marriage, the introduction of a child or other domestic progress, a main character leaves, or a new character appears. Many favourite sitcoms have been marked as suffering this fate, from 30 Rock to Parks and Rec, the US Office to Only Fools and Horses, as soon as the sharp edges get smoothed, it’s time for the last rites.
15 Storeys High joins the rare breed that declined to don water skis, and like The Office, Fawlty Towers, Spaced, and The Young Ones, it ran for two excellent series, but unlike many of those, it was cancelled, despite critical acclaim and a cult audience.
It appeared in 2002 when it aired on BBC Choice and was plonked around the schedules by dear old Auntie Beeb as they seemed intent on destroying any chance it had to gain an audience.
It tracks main protagonist and selfish misanthrope Vince Clark’s life, relationships and job as a lifeguard at a community swimming pool. Vince (played by Sean Lock) shares his tower block flat with the pathetic, hapless and hopelessly upbeat Errol, the closest thing he has to a friend, and played brilliantly by Benedict Wong. A pessimist and an optimist stuck in a flat or, as Lock himself describes them, it’s the classic double act combination of the “idiot who knows everything and the idiot who knows nothing”.
Vince’s mood and outlook set the tone and even the production and set design, dominated as it is by the colour grey. Their flat is grey, the estate is grey, even the sky seems permanently grey. But following in the tradition of other great sitcom miseries, Vince’s take on existence is dark in a way that it somehow pushes through into comedy.
Vince and Errol are interspersed with tales from the various other flats in his block and the collection of oddballs that lie within. The screen wipes between floors, going up and down or across depending on which floor they reside, moving from Bill Bailey’s terrible guitar teacher who simply expects his student to be able to play as well as him immediately, or along to the bizarre old man in his nasty vest and pants in front of a full length mirror fantasising that he is wrestler in a fight.
Lock didn’t plan to write a sitcom. He had been doing stand up for a while and thought that you simply got better at that and became successful. One of his peers told him that you needed to do something more and encouraged him to write a script for a radio comedy. He and Martin Trenaman wrote Sean Lock: 15 Storeys High after his initial foray with Sean Lock’s 15 Minutes of Misery, and it was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2000.
When it was picked up for TV, he and Trenaman added Lock’s friend from stand up Mark Lamarr (credited under his real name, Mark Jones) to the writing team and 15 Storeys High the TV sitcom was born.
Why so many people love it is open to debate. It is undeniably funny and yet gritty and grim, and while it is often surreal, it always feels authentic — particularly with the lack of laughter track or music — and manages to situate around the mundanity of everyday life, from car boot sales and swimming lessons, to an old lady who feeds the pigeons, and surprise birthday meals.
Lock said Vince is one of those people who just get washed up in London and is then stranded there. He is crucially believable, as is Errol and (many of) the other oddball characters.
Vince, while an Olympic level miserablist, possesses many familiar traits. For example, in one episode he keeps repeating anecdotes back to people that they told him, and passes them off as if they happened to him with seemingly no shame. He has a long running ‘feud’ with the flat across the landing as he suspects them of moving his doormat slightly when he’s not looking, and he is so devoid of joy that he treats popping bubble wrap as a chore.
His moral compass isn’t so much askew as deliberately misread. In one instance he sees lying that he only has one testicle to his colleague as merely “crafty”.
In a fan favourite episode Jolly Shopper, we see Vince lose it. Quite taken by the new east European mini mart and its astonishing bargains (their motto is, ‘If you can find it cheaper anywhere else, we’ll be embarrassed’), which include things like ‘Pork Pie Soup’, and he becomes addicted to an energy drink called, Blue Rat.
The drink promises to have ‘All the energy of a rat, trapped in a can’ and leads to Vince staying up all night, spying on other flats and devising a challenge that requires him to have all his snowstorms snowing at once. In it, Lock delivers a hilarious tour de force of narcotic driven mania.
The realism of the art direction is also something to marvel at. While much of the surroundings including the pool were shot in south London, the inside of Vince’s flat is a set, but even to anyone who’s spent time in one of those blocks, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the real thing. They achieved the effect with some creative lighting and a giant photo of a view from a flat window to mimic the real thing. It sounds ridiculous but the result is brilliant.
[Vince shouting at a man swimming in the pool]
Vince: “Stay in your lane! You’re drifting to the left!”
Swimmer: “I’ve only got one arm”
Vince: “Well just use one leg then!”
But most of all, it’s just perfect British comedy. Funny, dipped firmly in reality, full of pathos and farce, with a healthy dose of the surreal.
Even with the strange elements there’s enough to believe most of this could happen. The estranged father who is keeping a Shetland pony in his flat to keep his daughter happy, the awkward swingers who, because they ‘finished early’, are forced to listen to their partners ‘enjoying each other’, the two competitive old ladies racing in their Zimmer frames to the ringing phone, Peter Serafinowicz’s inept boy band manager lauding it over reluctant members, even the irritable and unsettling vicar who constantly mixes up Jesus and Judas seems somehow plausible.
Co-writer Mark Lamarr pops up as a silver statue street entertainer with violent tendencies, Toby Jones as a hygiene-obsessed man who forces a double glazing salesman (Paul Putner) to have a bath before they can talk, and the late Felix Dexter is fantastic as the door to door religious nut who uses a plethora of jobs to gain access.
It could be that the reason 15 Storeys High didn’t gain ‘enough’ popularity is the same reason it’s so deeply loved by some; it is harsh, real, familiar and depressing even, and yet odd and misshapen in its comedy, and the camera is often positioned in unusual yet everyday places, for example peering from behind the TV as an old man disagrees with every sentence uttered by the presenter.
And Vince is absolutely not a nice person.
For example, you are required to laugh when Vince systematically tracks down out of date ham to use in a sandwich he knows an annoying colleague will want to pinch and eat, so as to poison him. He has very few redeeming features other than he is, like many, finding it harder and harder to play along with the world.
It feels criminal that Sean Lock now mainly lives on our screens alongside the likes of Jimmy Carr and doesn’t have his obvious talents directed to more creative pursuits than panel shows.
But sometimes we are thrust into choices rather than making them. As Vince himself says with regard to having children, “Nobody wants children. They just get on with it. It’s like you fall over, you get a bruise on your arse. That’s life”
You can enjoy 15 Storeys High here on DVD or illegally like a dirty pig on YouTube.
Tom James
Buy Tom James’ new book Your Children Are Boring here on paperback and kindle in the UK, US and worldwide.
