Catastrophe review: seriously good comedy that’s oddly, unceasingly sincere

Couples, like any good double act, deserve chemistry. Laurel and Hardy had a bitter kind of co-dependency, and their relationship really could survive anything. Abbi and Ilana on Broad City have an intimacy verging on manic obsession, which seems to suit life in New York.

And Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney have it, on Catastrophe (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm), ever since her Irish schoolteacher scooched up to a crowded London bar to find a recovering alcoholic from the US, and then devoted the following week to a wild fling.

It flung further and faster than they expected – into a pregnancy, a cancer scare, a marriage and (when the show boldly shuttled forward a couple of years between its first two series), two children and a home. In a sign of the show’s gleeful acceleration, Rob never changed his lover’s name in his phone, labelled, apparently forevermore, “Sharon London Sex”.

That’s one way to keep the passion alive. But the singular quality that writers Horgan and Delaney rely on for their excellent comedy, as their characters careen between one life disaster and the next, is something more scabrous, rare and hilarious. It’s honesty.

“I want you to know that I’m going to look back at my time with you and remember you as an extraordinarily good-smelling woman with a magical ass,” Rob once told Sharon. A while later, when she retrieved her engagement ring from a nearby puddle of urine, Sharon contentedly accepted: “It’s just a bit of piss. I love it.”

Their friends and family may seem like variations on malicious personality disorders – including the fantastic Eileen Walsh as Kate, a creature of weaponised lust with an eternally mocking laugh; Jonathan Forbes as Sharon’s fluently sarcastic brother Fergal; and the late Carrie Fisher as a masterfully acrid mother in law – and Rob and Sharon’s marriage often seems like a sustained comedy roast, but among the show’s winning appeals is that it is oddly, unceasingly sincere. Even when they goad and lacerate, in their remarkably off-handed way, Sharon and Rob genuinely make each other laugh. Us too.

High stakes
The stakes, at the beginning of its third season, are higher, with a groundless sexual harassment case against Rob resulting in his unemployment and a return to drinking, while a drunken encounter for Sharon results in an emergency morning-after pill, which Rob duly discovers.

But the real friction, the show recognises, is any threat to this idealised comic honesty, this unfaltering badinage. Sharon is unable to conceal the truth any more than she can resist a brilliantly barbed gag. Unaware of how far her encounter went, she tells Rob that she investigated her underwear to find out.

"They smelt bad. But, you know, like normal bad." Rob, more worryingly, is keeping both his drinking and his feelings hidden. How long will he stay angry, Sharon asks. "A season," he begrudgingly offers. "Two or three months."

By Catastrophe's standards, that's bad. But, you know, normal bad.