2 April 2025

Ben Miller’s social media satire Austin misses the mark

This new BBC sitcom is no Colin from Accounts.

Michael Theo plays the estranged son of Miller’s children’s book writer. Photo by Kelly Tunney / BBC

Baffling as it is to read that Austin, a new BBC comedy starring Ben Miller and Sally Phillips, has already been a hit in Australia, I’m also vaguely reassured. Comedy, it would seem, is not Starbucks or Five Guys; globalisation doesn’t press on jokes as it does on high streets. Of course, it’s a happy thing that in Adelaide and Sydney this strange new export is liked: good for Miller, who co-wrote it, and perhaps some desperate government minister will soon deploy it at the despatch box (“I would say to my right honourable friend that Britain exports everything, up to and including substandard jokes – gags we intend to keep tariff free”). But still, I don’t think it will be a smash here. Colin from Accounts it is not.

We’re in Canberra, to which a pompous, bestselling children’s author, Julian Hartswood (Miller), and his fluttery illustrator wife, Ingrid (Phillips), have been sent to begin an Australian book tour. But alas, Melbourne may now forever elude them. In the first episode, Hartswood wakes up to the news that he’s in the process of being cancelled, having reposted a social media message about freedom of speech that emanated originally from the keyboard of a white supremacist. The couple’s first signing is a no-go, and like dominoes, other bookshops swiftly follow. The young people who grew up on Big Bear, the furry blue star of their stories, are very upset indeed to discover his co-creator is a Nazi.

Julian, however, is not to be put off. He finds another store that will host them, though when he and Ingrid get there, its sign (predictably, perhaps) is written in a weird Germanic font, Mein Kampf is in the window and the manager is called Odin. The two of them are about to scarper, when a young man appears, trailing a shopping trolley full of Big Bear books. This is Austin (Michael Theo), a forklift driver who promptly announces himself as Julian’s son. What? Julian is baffled. He remembers Austin’s mother, Mel (Gia Carides), with whom he worked 28 or so years ago in “the charged atmosphere” of “events catering”. But they only slept together (he insists) a couple of times. “Surely a baby requires a more sustained…” In the face of Ingrid’s mongoose stare, his voice begins to trail off.

Julian, though, is nothing if not pragmatic. In London, his team is already deep into crisis management: in their Zoom meetings, a man from Superb PR who formerly worked his magic on “Harry Styles and the marrow” talks of redemption in a thick South African accent. Tick, tick. Julian’s brain turns over at lightning speed. Perhaps Austin might come in handy here. He’s autistic (Theo, who plays him, was the star of the Australian reality show Love on the Spectrum, and this is his first acting role). He alights on the idea of a documentary in which Julian gets to know him, and even to love him.

The joy of this series is intended, I think, to come from the friction between Austin’s delightful innocence – Theo’s performance, I should say, is also delightful – and his father’s cynicism and self-interest. But the trouble is that while Julian is certainly not Michael “Paddington” Bond, he’s really not very nasty either. Ingrid, moreover, is a sweetheart who surely doesn’t deserve the whiffy storyline she’s given, in which a super-handsome waiter she chats up (revenge for Julian’s long-ago naughtiness) turns out to be a fetishist for menopausal hot flushes. Ugh. Not funny at all, guys.

A wilder, more productive tension results when the Hartswoods visit Austin at home, where he lives with his mother and grandfather Bill (Roy Billing), who’s as bracingly straightforward as Austin, albeit for different reasons (he’s as Australian as a platypus). I laughed properly for the first time at Bill’s encounter in episode two with Julian, in the same way that I laughed at Gordon’s ghastly family in Colin from Accounts. The talk was basic and slightly surreal – think prostate exams, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Miller’s chino-wrapped Englishness twisting his mouth into a simulacrum of a smile – and it was as if Miller and his co-writers were briefly unleashed. In those moments, I could see the (better, funnier, less twee) show that Austin might have been.

Austin
BBC One