10 September 2024

Colin from Accounts is back, and hilarious, wicked and true

This antic, immaculate show cuts both ways, sending up the tediously woke and the tediously un-woke alike.

Photo by BBC/CBS Studios/Paramount+ ©2024/Tony Mott

I didn’t review the first series of Colin from Accounts, and I can’t remember how, exactly, I found it. But perhaps this is the point: it found me! Television is so hyped lately, desperate streaming services having blown the budget on same-y, unlovable stuff no one is ever going to watch. When you find a show you adore, unburdened by expectations and the sight of waxworks on red carpets, a special kind of satisfaction follows. The discovery is yours, and thus you find yourself telling everyone you know that they simply must watch the crazy Australian romcom starring a sweet little dog on wheels.

If this sounds twee, fear not. Even as it is cute, Colin from Accounts is also filthy, flinty and punctuated with acts of random violence, including in its very first moments, when the little dog is crushed by Gordon (Patrick Brammall), a Sydney brewer, who runs him over having become distracted by the sight of a breast. It (the breast, not the dog) belongs to Ashley (Harriet Dyer), a student doctor, who has flashed it at him naughtily. But never mind. The dog, a stray, survives, his paralysed rear legs now boosted by wheels. The couple names him Colin, and they adopt both him and, ultimately, each other. First, Ashley is Gordon’s flatmate, and then, over the course of eight episodes (all on BBC iPlayer), his girlfriend.

The first series was immaculate: properly funny and utterly unexpected, its Oz energy seriously antic. I worried the second wouldn’t match up to it, the will-they-won’t-they grit having been removed from the oyster, which is now a not very freshly made double bed – and at first it seemed I might be right.But boy, it cranks up. Episode four, which I’ve just watched, is hilarious: wicked and true. Thanks to the age gap between Ashley and Gordon (the actors who play them are a real-life couple as well as the series’ writers) the show cuts both ways, sending up the tediously woke and the tediously un-woke alike. From where I’m sitting, this is more deliciously yeasty even than one of Gordon’s precious double-hopped IPAs.

A line like “that hat is a beige flag” doesn’t, I know, seem screamingly funny on the page. Writing about Colin from Accounts instantly deflates it, partly because it’s so well written – the humour coiled and cumulative, unfolding from its characters’ back and forth like comedy origami. But also because you need to see Dyer’s gurning and Brammall’s simmering for it take full effect (though they play everything straight, never begging for laughs). In the new series, Meggles (Emma Harvie), Ashley’s friend and colleague, gets a (horrible: it’s her hat that’s the beige flag) new girlfriend, Rumi, who tells Gordon he has a “common or garden variety madonna-whore complex”; a guy from a beer conglomerate tries to persuade Gordon to sell him his business by taking him to a strip club (“athletes, mate, athletes… in their prime”); and Ashley’s deluded mother, Lynelle (Helen Thomson), sets up a group called Women Against Women Against Men as
part of her ongoing strategy towards her creepy husband, Professor Lee, all of whose devices she has had to remove from his sweaty hands.

Meanwhile, Ashley is accused of sexual assault when she tries to fix an older patient’s catheter – “Do you need to see the slide show again?” asks her supervisor, to which she can only reply: “Look, his penis was a mess!” – and Gordon recovers from all the booze he drank during his corporate wooing by taking an ice bath in a wheelie bin that he has failed to clean first; some ancient greens and half a rat bob to the service, and in his fright, Gordon tips the whole thing over.

By the end of all this, I was so high I briefly considered getting Colin from Accounts shopping trolleys made for all my friends, the dog’s hairy body to be printed on the canvas and its wheels where his legs should be (brilliant idea, eh? – and if you’re in the marketing department at the Aussie network Foxtel: hands off, I’ve already copyrighted). I’m a full-on, happy-clappy evangelist for this show. If it’s charming, it’s also quietly daring, able to embrace pronoun jokes and grim, sexist-men jokes without any audible anxiety. I couldn’t like it more if I tried.