He tuts and whines moodily whenever asked to do anything at all. ‘Stath Lets Flats’ season three is currently airing on Channel 4. Stath, you see, is a six-year-old, in a suit, who can drive. But his linguistic tumbling through a language he’s only half learned actually signposts his essential character schtick. He only started speaking English on his arrival from Cyprus at 14, so we can excuse him calling clients “langlords”, hoping to work “park-time” in a barber’s or pronouncing pretty much everything like Borat having a stroke. Writer and star Jamie Demetriou pointedly gives Stath an excuse for his notoriously poor English, the Stath-isms which acts as the show’s comedy froth. Instead, it gave us the diametric opposite of South Park – the behaviours of the playground transposed into the adult world. Stath misses a million tricks by speeding through the viewing scenes, with their landing toilets, four-foot ceilings and kitchen-diner-bedroom-bogs. If we came to series one expecting a satirical takedown of a laughably overpriced and exploitative rental market that expects you to shell out 400 per cent of your monthly income to live in a ‘well-appointed’ cat litter tray above an all-night abattoir on Tooting’s ‘trendy’ Asbestos Mile, we were disappointed. Rarely, though, has the fine art of arrested development been so liberally, and often brilliantly, deployed as in Stath Lets Flats.
To allow your characters to age, evolve or experience major life changes – beyond the long-teased will-they-won’t-they cop-off at the end of series three – is to risk unbalancing the chemistry or, worse still, allowing them the faculties to consider escaping their intricately constructed comedy bear trap.
From Maggie Simpson to Father Dougal, arrested development is so core to the art and sustainability of the average sitcom that there’s even one named after it.
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