Audience Pleasures (4b) Friday Night dinner

Friday night dinner
       

This sitcom has a narrative in which the repetitive features are: setting the scene with the sons outside the house, they go into have dinner with their family, are interrupted by the weird neighbour and then leave. There will be a different story in the middle which the family have to cope with; the episode we watched was they were selling a sofa bed to a man. They then got it stuck on the stairs, the man was told his father died (who he was buying it for), then we watched how they awkwardly coped with it and the consequences of the sons immature behaviour. The show is always set in an around the house.

It is harder to put the characters into the 8 comedy characters as there are only 5 main characters and they don’t show the traits as much as the characters in bad education.

1.The Logical Smart One – responsible, stable: Jackie, meets the stereotypical mother role

2.The Lovable Loser – sarcastic, optimistic, needy, impulsive: Adam and Jonny the sons show the same traits throughtout even if they aren’t prominate

3.The Neurotic – awkward, nervous, controlling, worried: Jackie showed this trait the most in the episode we watched as the sofa bed starts ripping the wallpaper she yells at them to stop. She takes care of the family and is friendly and kind to the weird character Jim because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.

4.The Dumb One – friendly, naïve, gullible, no ulterior motive: Martin, the dad

5.The Bully – mean, insensitive, insecure, doesn’t apologize: Adam and Jonny pick on  each other in the typical sibling way so slightly meet this as they bully one another.

6.The Womanizer/Manizer (AKA “Slutty Spice”) – charming, seductive, horny, superficial: n/a

7.The Materialistic One – judgmental, entitled, spoiled: Adam and Jonny are ungrateful for a lot of things, I put them as this as they are too childish to even realise.

8.In Their Own Universe (AKA “Spacy Spice”) – odd, eccentric, uses illogical logic: Jim, the neighbour

This show has an audience demographic in B and C1 , there is a larger array in the age of the characters because the parents and neighbour will be known well by those 28-40 which then attracts them to the program. There isn’t the immature childlike humour that we see in bad education although we do see that in the sons. This then makes the viewer feel superior to the sons as the still act like children. Females watching will relate with the mother, Jackie, as she is the most sensible and in charge of the males of the family. The husband, Martin, is simple so also has jokes made from him as he can act like a caveman e.g. he was eating food from the bin, this will appear funny to females.

The target audience is both male and female but would initially attract males because of the characters. Jewish people would be the focus of their audience as it is based around a Jewish tradition of coming together for a meal with family on a Friday night. For those who are middle aged they're more likely to know Tasmin Greig from a variety of comedy sitcoms like greenwing.  Simon Bird is well known for being in the inbetweeners, a comedy about a group of boys in college,  which has a younger target audience to this program so younger viewers would likely watch it as he’s very recognisable. Tom Rosenthal isn’t as well-known as he was on a program for a younger audience so; it wasn’t as popular as the inbetweeners. Paul Ritter would be well known with the audience as he is of a similar age and has been in a lot of popular shows and films. Mark Heap is similar to Paul as he has also been in popular TV shows and films, and is of a similar age to the audience.  Due to the amount of well-known male actors in the program it suggests an audience of 25 year olds to middle aged men.

Friday night dinner is on channel 4, they have a lot of comedy shows for all ages, but it is typically for an older audience of 30-45. The show has two producers; Popper Pictures and Big Talk Productions. Channel 4 is a terrestrial program meaning it is on all TV’s. Channel 4 is commercial;  it makes it money from advertising so there are breaks every 10- 15 minutes. The program is on after the watershed at 9 pm because of the use of language and inappropriate references, for example the joke the sons have calling each other ‘pissface’.