The Royle Family (TV Series) The New Sofa (2008) User Reviews

Fab!

[deborah-64202 · 8/10 · 29 November 2020]

And you can't even spell their name! Stoopid! It's Royle

I am disappointed with The New Sofa

[HammTate · 6/10 · 26 December 2008]

The Royle Family has to be one of the best shows of the last ten years. What made it so dynamic was the writing and of course the brilliant acting. The writing was always subtle and always carefully steered away from obvious gags. Its sheer genius and its main strength was the believability factor. This was evident in every episode ever made, and meant that we could all identify with at least one of the characters as being like a member of our own family.'The New Sofa' started off promisingly, with the four main characters indulging in the usual banter that we all love, and have sorely missed. However, after the first few minutes everything changed. I didn't recognise my old favourite, as it disintegrated into a farcical sitcom. Lines as subtle as a punch in the face, meant that you had guessed the gag, five lines before the punchline was delivered. Denise and Dave's frozen turkey farce was lifted straight out of an early 70s sitcom, and provided zero laughs, as they attempted to defrost the bird in a hot bath, kicked it in to an airing cupboard and then finally took to hacking it with various power tools. I quite enjoyed the scene with the reclining sofa. The line (referring to the sofa): 'It is flame retarded' was a particular favourite of mine. For me the saving grace was Helen Fraser, who played Dave's mum. It was refreshing to see her play a completely different role to her character in Bad Girls. She emerged as the only believable character, avoiding some of the pitfalls that the other actors had fallen into, due to the sledgehammer humour of the script. In fact some of the better parts of this episode were between the two mothers. I missed the next door neighbours; and I missed Nana. Having her photograph etched on a Christmas tree bauble wasn't enough. This episode lacked the pathos that every episode had given us previously. The format had been unwisely changed and the result was the only sub standard episode ever produced. On the plus side, this is still probably much funnier than any other sitcom that is on our screens today.

Not worth the bother.

[malb-35312 · 2/10 · 14 November 2020]

The Royale family is without doubt one of the best sitcoms of the last couple of decades but this Christmas special is embarrassingly awful.

A Christmas too far

[dmcurtin · 4/10 · 16 December 2019]

This has to be the worst Royals ever , it's like as if they were asked to come back to the well just one time too many a bit like watching a once great boxer come back for one more shot at the title when he knows his legs are gone ., They all look older but that's ok if the script reflects this but what we get is once great characters trying to lift the poor script back up to the 5 star level we are used to , for me Dave's parents are miscast they don't really bare any resemblance to what I thought Dave's parents would look or act like .. The one really annoying scene is the Frozen Turkey one where Dave and Denise do their best impressions of deluded fools they resort to all sorts of stupid comedy sketches trying to defrost it embarrassingly bad and as about as funny as a tooth ache ... the reason this is so bad is the high standards they set but as a one off to someone who's never saw the Royal family it would come across as amusing but to true Royal fans this was a Christmas episode too far !