The Friday Night Dinner cast on losing Paul Ritter: ‘It’s a little rip in the fabric of reality’
Usually, “How We Made It…” documentaries about hit TV shows are pretty turgid affairs. Friday Night Dinner: 10 Years and a Lovely Bit of Squirrel, however, is different. That’s because of the death of Paul Ritter last month. For a decade Ritter played Martin, the father of the dysfunctional Goodman family in the Channel 4 sitcom and the documentary now functions in part as a tribute to his unique talent. Tamsin Greig, who played his wife Jackie, introduces the 90-minute special with a section that is heartfelt and hugely touching. In it, she talks about how much Ritter wanted to appear in the documentary, even though by that point he was seriously ill with the brain tumour that would kill him.
Ritter talks about how, after decades of acclaimed theatre work, Martin Goodman, an oddball dad, whose catchphrases include the one in the show's title, just fell into his lap. As the show became a hit on Channel 4, and later on Netflix, Martin became Ritter’s best known role.
“And then,” Tamsin Greig tells me, “a lot more people realised how brilliant he was.”
Greig finds it hard to talk about Ritter - “this beautiful man who has left this incredible legacy in the work that he's done”. The actor had been nominated for Olivier and Tony awards in the 2000s, and would continue to show his startling range in the years to follow, playing roles as diverse as Eric Sykes in ITV’s Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, Pistol (in BBC Two’s The Hollow Crown) and nuclear engineer Anatoly Dyatlov in the HBO drama Chernobyl.
“It's devastating for the industry that he's not around any more,” Greig says. “There was so much more to come from him… I wanted, want, to see his King Lear.”
Friday Night Dinner creator Robert Popper cast Ritter in 2010 for a role he had modelled on his own father. The idea for the show came suddenly, he says. “One day I was in the bath, and I did just sit up and say, ‘Friday night dinner.’”
Popper was thinking of his own family meals. “I just knew what that was because being Jewish, though not religious, we would always be going home on Friday night for dinner with the family.” He set out to capture “that feeling you have when you go home: whatever age you are, you regress. You become 13 again.”
He particularly wanted to catch the quickfire repartee and cross-talking. “Robert is always going, ‘Could you just talk faster, faster, faster,’” says Greig. “People say, ‘Oh, do you improvise?’ We so don't improvise. It's so crafted.”
The speed of the raillery, particularly between Simon Bird’s Adam and Tom Rosenthal’s Jonny, comes from Popper’s own relationship with his brother, also called Jonny. “Friday nights were like a regular family get together with lots of arguing. We get on very well, but the game has always been to find clever ways to ruin each other’s meals.”
That competitive wrangling formed the backbone of the boys’ humour in Friday Night Dinner, while many of Popper’s father’s traits – including the now famous catchphrase ‘Shit On It!’ were ported directly to Martin Goodman (“Although my dad doesn’t walk around with his top off,” Popper says.)
The reason why Friday Night Dinner took off however, is more to do with universals than specifics.
“It’s about a family,” says Popper. “Everyone can instantly relate to that. And actually, the family do love each other. And they do all sit down and eat together and they meet every week. And there’s something nice about that.”
Oddly, some of the show’s best moments have involved pathos. One of Popper’s greatest creations is Jim (Mark Heap), the Goodmans’ bizarre neighbour who pops round with his dog Wilson - which he’s scared of.
Heap picks two highlights from 37 episodes, one of which saw him covered in red paint (“it was actually coloured yoghurt going down my nose and in my ears and down my pants and things, which is not very pleasant”) and the other having to cry.
“The death of Wilson at the end of series five was difficult,” Heap says. “I think we were outdoors that night, and it was the coldest night of the year and sort of minus 11 windchill, yet there we were having to do this slightly emotional stuff, a little sobby section.”
It’s worth viewing again. Friday Night Dinner was not going to continue beyond a sixth series even before Ritter’s death – both Popper and the lead cast thought it was time to move on. But a decade and 37 episodes on British TV for a sitcom based on nothing more than a family getting together to eat Shabbat dinner, is remarkable. And the sense of an inalterable full stop means this retrospective ends up being not just very funny but also poignant.
As Heap says of his co-star Ritter, “It just seems just wrong, doesn't it? He's not there any more. It's like a little rip in the fabric of reality. It's just wrong.”
Friday Night Dinner: 10 Years and a Lovely Bit of Squirrel airs on Channel 4 on Friday 28 May at 9pm