Real Life, the Sitcom

British television viewers have recently been captivated by “The Royle Family,” but the spelling indicates, it’s not the one in Buckingham Palace.

Creator, co-writer, star and third-season director Caroline Aherne’s fictional sitcom family, which has mesmerized U.K. audiences through a scant 20 episodes dribbled out over the past three years, couldn’t be further from British nobility.

Dad (Ricky Tomlinson) scratches his private parts, passes gas and badgers sullen teen son Antony (rising star Ralf Little), the entire family’s errand boy, to go out and get cigarettes. Mom’s (Sue Johnston) favorite conversational gambit is asking visitors what they had for tea, or supper, and the many pregnant pauses in conversation often get filled by her offer of a snack or a cigarette. Self-obsessed daughter Denise (Aherne) buys a leather jacket through a catalog, plans her wedding to fiance Dave (co-writer Craig Cash) and, in later episodes, proves to be an indifferent mother. Other characters come and go, but the real star of the show is the television set, which is always on and always the center of attention as the human characters take up their familiar positions on the living room couch and chairs, where almost all the action takes place.

In a TV world in which viewers are flocking to programs with contrived, highly edited scenarios that purport to portray reality, “The Royle Family” makes perfect sense.

There are no one-liners, no laugh track, no audience, only one camera, and the show is shot in real time. It’s life-scripted, to be sure, but life-as lived in a northern England lower-middle-class housing complex, in half-hour increments of life’s plodding familiarity. And for many viewers, it’s very funny. Despite its extreme subtlety, it could even represent what the future may look like for the struggling American sitcom, which is searching for new forms.

Why is listening to a woman ask, for the umpteenth time, about someone else’s tea funny?

“You either get it or you don’t,” says British actress Brenda Blethyn, a fan. “It’s so truthful, so honest. I adore it. I have friends who loathe it.”

As for Blethyn, the appeal for many viewers seems to be the reality Aherne brings home. “These are characters that, once you get to know them, you expect you could turn the corner in Manchester and there they would be,” says Danielle Lux, controller of entertainment commissioning for the BBC.

When it first came on in Britain, viewers were “watching the screens saying, ‘Oh my God, that’s us.’ It took us a year to start laughing,” says Paul Lee, chief operating officer of the U.S. cable channel BBC America, which began airing the first six episodes last August. “Once you hear the cyclical conversation for the seventh time, your reaction turns from horror to complete hilarity.”

Underpinning it all is the sense that the family members, no matter how much they bicker, care deeply for one another, not unlike the families in “Roseanne” or the even earlier “All in the Family.” That sentiment comes through poignantly in Aherne’s favorite episode, when pregnant Denise’s water breaks and her awkward father is sent to the bathroom to keep her company while her “mam” fetches a taxi. Actor Ben Kingsley, who does a dead-on impression of the dialogue, calls the series “Chekhov,” and Lux prefers to call it a “soap-com.”

“The reality shows people are watching in America now sound fake because they are fake,” says Lee. “Her show is a comedy that sounds real. The fact that they watch television the whole time reminds me of the early [Harold] Pinters, they are so painfully real. I’m sure she didn’t mean it, but it is the moment where true fiction is more real than reality.”

British TV has a recent history of risk-taking series, but Aherne’s show, whose entire run is coming to BBC America in June, was considered so far out of the norm that it almost didn’t make it on air.

Before “Royle” debuted in 1998, Aherne, who says she idolizes film director Woody Allen and is obsessed with finding out what he thinks of her show, was already well-known to British television audiences. In addition to her frequent appearances in tabloid gossip columns, Aherne had a track record of unconventionality for her series and character “Mrs. Merton,” a frumpy, cheeky talk-show host of a certain age. (In real life, Aherne is 37 and shows up for an interview dressed in tight striped pants, a leather jacket and gold rings on every finger.) Mrs. Merton interviewed real guests in front of an audience recruited from the real local home for the elderly. At one point during the series’ run, Aherne took the program-and 70 of her pensioners-to Las Vegas’ Flamingo Hotel to tape three shows. Apparently not all the American guests, who included Tammy Wynette, Tony Curtis and Bo Derek, realized that the host wasn’t quite real. People brought in to fill out the audience didn’t get the gag either. “They thought I was being really rude,” and walked out mid-show, says Aherne, concluding that Americans have no sense of irony.

When BBC executives wanted another round of “Mrs. Merton” episodes, Aherne agreed on condition that they finance the “Royle Family” pilot.

A first pilot, which Aherne and her crew were given a weekend to do, did not work, says Aherne, after the self-professed “control freak” lost a battle with executives to shoot it single-camera. The project, eventually redone Aherne’s way, languished for a year before it got on BBC2, the BBC’s alternative channel; Lux, who wasn’t involved in the initial decisions, says executives were terrified of what the reaction might be. But next-day reviews called the show brilliant, and after a strong run on BBC2, the series moved to the main BBC channel, a rare feat, where it drew hit-size ratings. With only half a dozen episodes produced at a time, unlike in the U.S., where success means a show creator must crank out 22 episodes a year, Aherne was able to produce “beautiful, shiny, small gems,” Lux says.

Aherne’s premise was to avoid the “situation” in traditional sitcoms and emphasize character, giving the show a “fly on the wall type thing, with a documentary edge. . . . I’d seen so many sitcoms where too much happened,” she says. Snappy banter, with every exchange setting up a joke, had to go. “Nobody speaks like that. . . . Nobody ever thinks that quickly,” says Aherne, who insists that “one-person vision” is what produces good television. Although “The Royle Family” dialogue was scripted, much ended up being improvised. Laughs can hinge on something as subtle as the way a character turns her head. Aherne in person exhibits little of the subtlety of the show that came out of her head. She shows up for an interview at her agent’s office in London’s media-centric Soho neighborhood with her mom and a dog in tow, along with fake doggie-do, which she hides behind the office planter when her agent has his back turned. She asks that her interviewer include her IQ (176, she says), part of an inside joke with Cash. She speaks her mind in a very un-Hollywood-like fashion, gleefully recounting her experiences when she visited Los Angeles to sell her show to the Americans. (HBO, she says, “didn’t want it. They weren’t sure at first and then they went, ‘Oh no.’ ” She’s so far oblivious to the Hollywood culture of positive spin. “I’d bet my house on it that [American viewers] won’t get it,” she says of her series.

The journey to a U.S. remake wasn’t smooth. Bill Hamm, executive vice president of series programming for Granada Entertainment USA, which holds the rights, says many prospective buyers were intrigued but “found it much more experimental than they were comfortable with.” Talks with Marcy Carsey (Aherne calls the executive by her full name because she likes its rhythm and alliteration) fell through. With William Morris agent Ben Silverman helping Aherne and Cash make the rounds, however, Sony’s Columbia TriStar Television eventually acquired it and sold a pilot to CBS, where, with Randy Quaid playing the lounger-bound father, it is a candidate for the fall schedule. It’s set in Boston and been dubbed “The Kennedys,” after America’s closest thing to royalty.

Columbia TriStar executives say they are committed to the original’s unglossy feel, long pauses and no studio audience. Because U.S. shows must accommodate ads, unlike U.K. shows, “The Kennedys” won’t be strictly in real time, however.

Still, as one of several pilot projects experimenting with real time at the networks this season (NBC’s project with Julia Louis-Dreyfus is another), “The Kennedys” responds to a “call to come up with new ideas, new formats, new ways of making television shows,” says Tom Mazza, president of network television for Columbia TriStar Television.

“Situation comedies are in a bit of a doldrums,” says Hamm. “We haven’t really had our ‘Seinfeld’ in about eight or nine years now. The genre needs something dramatically different. I think something that plays like a real-com could work.” Whether the recently shot pilot will work and CBS will put the show on the fall schedule won’t be known before mid-May.

“The Kennedys” was co-written and is being executive produced by Maya Forbes, a writer and co-executive producer on Aherne’s favorite U.S. comedy, HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show,” and her husband, Wally Wolodarsky, whose producing credits include “The Simpsons.” Some elements have changed in the remake: There’s more junk food and no smoking (CBS said OK, but the producers decided it would be a distraction, Hamm says), and the boyfriend character will be African American. At some point, Aherne, who had been actively involved in the remake along with Cash, says she felt as though she was losing control, so she pulled out of the development process, although the studio says she and Cash are consultants. Granada’s Hamm says the problem was a need for Aherne to be in Los Angeles for the development process: “We welcome her input.”

One thing likely to be sacrificed in the remake-if it gets on the air-is the extreme slowness of the pilot and the willingness to wait weeks for audience acceptance; U.S. studios and networks don’t have the luxury of waiting for viewers to catch on.

BBC America too is changing the way it schedules the original when it comes back in June, to draw viewers’ attention. It will run in four-to-five-hour blocks on Friday nights, although that means it will merely have “the same amount of action as in a 22-minute traditional sitcom,” Lee quips.

Back in Britain, Aherne has been working on writing and producing a movie, about a hairdresser who decides to “go mobile,” or make house calls, but must first learn how to drive. There’s also a developmentally disabled son, who is the star of the family, after a real family Aherne knew. “It’s just a very, very small film,” Aherne says. “That’s just what I like doing.”

BBC and Granada executives would like another six episodes of “The Royle Family,” but Aherne, who turned down roles in the feature films “Billy Elliot” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” says she’s not interested. Lux held out hope that Aherne could eventually be persuaded, but Aherne announced April 9 she is quitting show business for the moment-even delaying the movie-after paparazzi stalked her on a vacation out of England. *