Caroline Aherne

The Royle Family rewards attention to the writing of apparently uneventful conversation. Aherne co-wrote with Craig Cash, with Henry Normal contributing to the first series, and its domestic exchanges make silence, repetition and shared assumptions part of the structure. Compare that with Mrs Merton’s carefully innocent questions to hear two uses of understatement. The attraction is how little needs to happen externally for a character to reveal something. Credit the collaboration while noticing the consistency of that sharply observant comic perspective.