The Little Guys

British Comedy’s Most Perfect Support Characters

The formula for the perfect British sitcom is by no means a penned-down formula: for every hit, there have been a hundred duds, lost in the chasms of YouTube clip history and satellite television repeats. For the success stories, however, one uniting element is the presence of, not one or two, but a wealth of perfectly written characters that tap serenely into the British psyche. Behind every David Brent and Alan Partridge, there are some truly artistic perfections of comedy, not worthy in their own right of the spotlight, but somehow integral to the success of the show.

Michael (I’m Alan Partridge)

Before he voiced the now infamously irritating Meerkat in the never-ending Compare the Market adverts, Simon Greenall built cult comic acclaim as handyman and war veteran Michael in this Ianucci-penned classic. Perhaps the closest thing that Alan has to a friend, Michael endlessly recounts racist and risqué stories of Vietnam in his almost indecipherable Geordie accent, much to Partridge’s intrigue. He is a portrait of a man that has been to the brink of mental despair and back, dangerously toeing the line, just as Partridge does, between comedy and tragedy, but never dipping in his enthusiasm and optimism for his menial job at the deathly Linton Travel Tavern.

Best Moment: Panicking at the arrival of the police after Partridge tries to steal a traffic cone, Michael legs it off into the darkness only to reemerge several hours later.

Keith (The Office)

Through school, university, and in the workplace, there is always that one person who doesn’t quite make sense in the real world, but have somehow managed to exist. These are the Keiths of the world, the silent and eternally irreverent at the wrong moments, always lurking somewhere in the background with a packet of crisps or a comically enlarged scotch egg. Keith makes a scarce appearance in the Ricky Gervais’ breakout comedy, but the choice appearances he makes are memorable. He perfectly sums up the unambitious, criminally boring drones that roam the offices of bland satellite towns like Slough, wearing the same clothes into work every day, and stating his biggest disappointment in life is that he never went to Alton Towers.

Best Moment: One-on-one with Tim, Keith spills all about the secret to his sexual success, before devouring his trademark Scotch egg.

Super Hans (Peep Show)

In his mind, he is the version of himself that he wished he was when he was a pot-smoking teenager: in reality, Super Hans is a fairly useless but unrelentingly interesting man-child, simultaneously leaching off and fucking over Jez (probably his only friend). For here we have, in one of the most spot-on, well-written characters of the 21^st century, a highly functioning, recreational drug user, a stencil for the man no one wants to be, but everyone wants around. Hans is renowned for, in his own words, his ‘off-key remarks and crazy insights’, his drug induced anti-establishment paranoia, as well as a whole number of inexplicable characteristics that only really make sense because it’s him. Why is his flat full of snakes? Why is his New Year’s Eve party ‘the heart of darkness’? Who are the twins? In a show whose USP is that it gets inside its protagonists’ minds, we thank God that we don’t have to peer inside Hans’ twisted, unhinged brain. He’s like one of his favourite Class A’s: we miss him when he isn’t there, but too much of the man we’d be curled up in the corner begging to listen to some Snow Patrol.

Best Moment: An incredibly difficult decision for the man who might be the highlight of the 8 Series show. It’s a toss-up between the time he cuts out the crack and accidentally runs to Windsor, or when he unexpectedly reveals that he is in fact the father of two German twins, a fact never previously or from then on referred to.

Brian (Spaced)

A true cult classic of video dungeon proportions, this early 00’s surreal-com starred a blossoming Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (pre-Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz days) in one of the most bizarre, non-sequitur, yet amazingly down-to-earth depictions of turn of the millennium unemployed 20-somethings. Amidst all this is post-modernist uber-pretentious artist Brian, the weird bloke from downstairs from whose room erupts the most unusual of noises and experiments. Packed full of unusual remarks and awkward facial expressions, Mark Heap has made a career from playing this role on repeat in Green Wing, Friday Night Dinner, and a whole host of cameo-performances. Indecipherably weird, Brian flits in and out of the scene, shrouded in melancholy and mystery: in a show which features illegal robot wars, zombie invasion, and extraterrestrial horror in North London, Brian is the most absurd element in there.

Best Moment: Brian finally strikes success and gets an installation in a ‘cool’ gallery, only to knock himself unconscious for the duration of the event. And, because it’s modern art, it’s a huge success.

Jamie McDonald (The Thick of It)

While Peter Capaldi’s notorious Malcolm Tucker was always the likely choice, his increasing role throughout the series has led him somewhat to be the protagonist/antihero of the show, and thus no longer a ‘little guy’. Enter ‘The Crossest Man in Scotland’ Jamie McDonald, second in command to Tucker and equally, if not more, tactless and repulsive. Constantly on the verge of bursting a blood vessel in his head, McDonald makes up for his shorter screen time by firing out expletives and threats at a machine gun rate. Together making up the ‘Caledonian Mafia’ that runs Number 10, McDonald is arguably the one man who can match up to Tucker’s penchant for verbal abuse. At closer examination, McDonald is perhaps the more heartless of the pair: while Tucker lacks compassion, he is driven by something more benevolent; McDonald, on the other hand, is driven purely by self-motivation and careerism, a real shocking yet worryingly accurate portrait of the modern unelected politician.

Best Moment: He tells Tucker that he recently went to go see There Will Be Blood, in his eyes the perfect title (along with ‘There Will Be Tits’, before lamenting the fact that there wasn’t even that much blood.