Hooray for medium pace

Outside Edge

DVD Box Set. 570 minutes, £39.99
A full decade before Ashes Fever, cricket was pulling in ten million viewers on prime time ITV. Well, ish: Outside Edge is about cricket in the same way that Fawlty Towers is about hotels, the on-field activities of Brent Park village cricket club a back-drop for closely observed off-field intrigues. It’s as much about relationships, affairs and potential divorce resulting from untoward events on away trips to Dorking, as it is about getting 11 together for the deadly annual rivalry with Cromer.

Most long-runningTV series have had their cricket episode, but Outside Edge is possibly the longest work of fiction set around the game (go on – write in). Winner of the 1994 British Comedy Awards best comedy-drama, this box set brings together the 21 episodes from the three mid-90s series plus a stretched-too-thin Christmas Special – in which the team go to Corfu – and the original one-off TV version of Richard Harris’ play from 1982, with Paul Eddington, Maureen Lipman and Prunella Scales in the lead roles.

The Brent Park team are a disparate bunch, brought together by cricket, who would have no reason to be friends or even to know each other in the Real World: the ageing lech, the ageing lothario, the ambitious yuppie – and the none-more-relaxed Kevin (Timothy Spall) and his brassy/nympho wife (Josie Lawrence).

At the heart of it all is Roger Dervish (Robert Dawes, just on the cusp on overdoing it): captain, treasurer, match secretary, president, Godfrey Evans obsessive, idiot. A pompous ass, somewhere on the comic grotesque line between Captain Mainwaring and David Brent, he’s at once ridiculous and pitiable: he responds to an attempted dressing-room coup by taking to his bed and pretending to have some kind of terminal illnesss, in a last-ditch bid to win back support for his captaincy.

Needless to say, Dervish is a hopeless player as well as a buffoon; but if he wasn’t captain, then his mousey and put-upon wife Mim (Brenda Blethyn) wouldn’t do the teas. And then what? With no laughter track, Outside Edge is a slow burner, based on bittersweet character comedy rather than belly-laughs. Like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, set in the Home Counties, with the cast of a Mike Leigh film, it’s slightly dated only by the glut of edgier comedy-drama that has followed in the decade since it was aired.

Those for whom amateur cricket denotes Premier Leagues, gym sessions and youth policies will not find their views reflected here. But Outside Edge is/was a great, deadpan slice of Middle England: you need to give it time but anyone who’s ever played for a ramshackle mixed-age village or club side, run by someone who sees themselves as a cross between Mike Brearley and Winston Churchill, will recognise and quietly enjoy plenty of the shenanigans here.
In a nutshell
Box-set of long-running cricket sitcom
Any sauce?

Perpetual pursuit of Timothy Spall round cricket pavilions by nympho-maniacal Josie Lawrence in a fur coat. You be the judge.
Verdict ••••