Nan: From Sitcom to the Big Screen –

You could have been a newborn nematode worm living in the far reaches of some distant nebula, deaf, sightless and utterly ignorant of the world beyond your toxic gas cloud, let alone the intricacies of mid-2000s character-based sketch comedy, and you still could have predicted with some certainty that Catherine Tate’s The Nan Movie was going to be a resounding flop.

For the uninitiated, The Nan Movie follows the adventures foul-mouthed pensioner Joan ‘Nan’ Taylor, a character originally conceived on Tate’s eponymous sketch show, as she tracks down her dying step-sister with the help of her ever-disapproving son, Jaime (Matthew Horne). The more I think about Tate’s latest release, the more confused and angry I become. It’s as though the cheaply-made and somewhat obnoxious posters desperately imploring me to spend £8 of my hard-earned cash on a film that wouldn’t have made sense 15 years ago, let alone in 2022, are in some way goading me via their mere presence. The same thought occurs to me every time I see Tate’s gurning visage: “Why? Why now? Why ever? What were they thinking?”

I am genuinely yet to figure it out. Sitcom to movie adaptations are rocky roads at best, let alone adaptations from a single sketch character only somewhat popular more than 15 years ago. Even the far superior Absolutely Fabulous’ big-screen outing only just managed to achieve a modicum of success after a similarly extended hiatus.

The Catherine Tate Show debuted in 2004, a year of Tony Blair, George Bush and Travis, of the Iraq War and Jack Wills. 2004 was so long ago, Arsenal were the best football club in England, the thought of Brexit was inconceivable, and the British public had only just twigged the fact that mercilessly ripping foxes to pieces as ritualised upper-class pageantry might be straying into the inhumane. No TikTok, no Twitter, no Snapchat, Netflix operating via DVDs and everyone still saying “I’m a Lady” and “Garlic Bread?!” five times daily. Those were the days.

As much as I yearn for those carefree times, I don’t have much desire to see many of those cultural offerings resurrected from their respective graves and then reanimated on the big screen. What it has made me consider, however, is whether or not this sort of thing ever works. If you could peg The Nan Movie as a stinker from 50 miles away, surely there was sufficient evidence to suggest that this sort of thing never ends well? Well, yes. But also, no.

The TV-to-cinema adaptation can usually be broken down into three distinct categories. Firstly, shows that started out terrible and only had their awfulness magnified by the big screen’s unforgiving lens. Secondly, shows that were great while on TV but turned into absolute stinkers on transition, sullying the good reputation of their source material. Thirdly, the good from the good, original programmes that were brilliant in their initial incarnations and then ended up being pretty decent as fully-fledged features.

What’s clear about The Nan Movie is that, regardless of your original view of The Catherine Tate Show, it’s an inherently bad film. The most contemporaneous and apposite example from which comparison can be drawn is Mrs. Brown’s Boys: D’movie, a feature-length release also birthed from trying to create an entire movie based on the broad, catchphrase-spouting ‘humour’ of its central protagonist. Whatever you think of the original show (I happen to think it’s set British culture back 30 years), the movie’s 6% Rotten Tomatoes score should have served as some sort of warning that such a transition might not have been as smooth as Mr. O’Carroll had hoped. Tate and co. clearly didn’t take much notice when attempting the same trick.

It’s a transitional problem that isn’t restricted to comedy’s gurning barrel-scrapers. Harry Hill’s TV Burp was essential viewing for those of us who enjoyed the comic’s quirky and inoffensively surreal mocking of the small screen in the mid-to-late 2000s, a joyously anarchic half-hour carried entirely by the genius emanating from Mr. Hill’s shiny great dome. Yet when The Harry Hill Movie came out in 2013 (also drawing great mirth from the idea of the ‘comedy Nan’), it was about as enjoyable as a Tabasco enema. Hill’s absurdist comedy stylings seemed infantile, forced and risible as they unfolded without in-studio audience laughter – or any laughter full stop.

Shows such as TV Burp operate like exclusive clubs, as a special comedy cabal of enthusiasts who understand the rhythm and pacing of its quickfire surrealism. Burp’s format allowed it to keep moving quickly, even the longest segments barely exceeding five minutes before another gag came in at the expense of Louis Walsh’s bizarre roster of facial expressions or the latest clunky line delivery on Eastenders. Stretching out any one of these jokes or situations into a full-length movie, however, just renders everything utterly bizarre, tiresome and forced, like taking a thoroughbred racehorse and forcing it to play a round of chess. Nothing tessellates properly.

That isn’t to say that the move to the big screen can’t pay dividends if done correctly. Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip successfully bridged the gap between television and film by taking both routes, each time airing as a six-part series before being edited into accompanying feature-length movies. And more conventional adaptations have still found acclaim from tweaking their source material for a more mainstream audience. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, for instance, succeeded in taking a beloved comedy creation like Partridge and raising the stakes from the cutely banal to the comically absurd. As Alan attempts to navigate a real-life hostage situation while living his dream of being a James Bond-esque hero, we sense this is the culmination of a fantasy that has driven much of his behaviour throughout the character’s existence.

Other similar successes have merely been excuses to double down on everything that made a certain creation beloved, iconic or controversial in the first place, or else to expand on a character’s motivations and backstory by giving them the dedication of an entire standalone feature. Sacha Baron Cohen’s original triumvirate of comedy creations, Ali G, Borat and Bruno, all made the leap from segments on various shows to their own respective cinematic outings. Borat: Cultural Learnings is the most successful of the three, but each has its own charms and flaws, even if at times it feels as if Cohen was indulging in the stereotypes surrounding his characters rather than using them as satirical representations designed to uncover the prejudices of others.

What Cohen’s creations do provide is an interesting window into how and why these movie adaptations find success and why they so often don’t. Cohen’s wannabe ‘gangsta’ poseur Ali G might have been his most popular guise, and the first to be given his own titular show, but 2002’s Ali G: Indahouse suffers from many of the issues that would go on to plague The Harry Hill Movie, The Nan Movie and similarly weak adaptations, struggling when taken out of a structure and format designed to get the most from its central protagonist.

Ali’s bone-headed ignorance as an interviewer when tackling issues of religion, feminism or race grounded Da Ali G Show in a perceptively satirical streak, a streak that was lost in the film version in favour of cheaper, easier laughs and a broader, more convoluted plot. While Borat incorporated Cohen’s reliable interview format into the Kazakhstanian’s desire to learn more about America, Ali G: Da Movie floundered by taking its protagonist out of a structure in which he was most effective.

Borat and Bruno may have also dropped their satirical bent in favour of merely mocking their titular targets, but both respective features felt as though they were finding appropriate mediums through which to explore these characters further. Borat: Cultural Learnings…, by far Cohen’s best feature-length film, works particularly well because it digs out comedic value from the cultural clashes and ‘fish out of water’ setups of its hapless Kazakhstani protagonist’s adventures in America. It doesn’t hurt that Cultural Learnings is also one of the best-written and flat-out funniest things the British comic has ever done, but it’s the effective melding of satire, silliness and slapstick that really gives it its edge.

Often, the transition to the big screen can evolve more naturally. The next logical step for The Inbetweeners, for instance, a show revolving around four social misfit sixth formers navigating their respective ways through adolescence, was to take its heroes out of full-time education and into the ritualised carnage of the post-school, pre-uni lads’ holiday. Neither of The Inbetweeners movies are particularly groundbreaking, but there’s never a leap of imagination required to comprehend that four young men recently out of full-time education may wish to take their antics abroad.

Had Jay, Will, Simon and Neil found themselves fired into space or foiling a plot to assassinate the American President, things might have seemed somewhat disingenuous. So seeing Mrs. Brown take on Russian mobsters with the assistance of a troupe of trainee ninjas, or Tate’s foul-mouthed granny slamming Jaegers at a student night, we can’t help but be aware that we’re some way away from any sort of logical progression of these established characters.

What this all teaches us, ultimately, is that format is as important as character, and that a timeless creation can flounder if the medium simply isn’t right for the figure around which it is built, an issue that often becomes glaringly obvious when the writers attempt to bridge the gap between two distinct platforms. The feel, pacing and direction of a sitcom or sketch show are far different from that of a comedy movie – snappier, punchier dialogue crammed with gags and designed for a live audience often seems out of place in a structure not designed to accommodate such quickfire pacing.

Too often, this transition to the big screen is rendered by writers failing to understand that they are playing to a different audience via a different means, going for far-fetched, convoluted setups and plotlines in a bid to raise the comedic stakes at the expense of what made the original such a hit. As Cohen and others have demonstrated, the feat is by no means impossible, but get it wrong and you’re in danger of a monumental dud. For every Borat: Cultural Learnings, there often seems to be a Nan Movie waiting in the wings to remind us just how excruciating such duds can be.

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