It recently occurred to me what exactly it was that appealed to me about My Family. I've loved it since it was first shown by the BBC, and now I think I know why. It has much to do with the characters.
Ben is about as far away from the stereotypical father as you can get. He isn't proud of his kids - at one point he actually says of his eldest son, "Why did we have him?". He hates his job, he hates the people he works with and he almost seems to hate the life fate has meant him to live. Susan isn't much of the perfect housewife, either. She can't cook to save her life, but it never seems to bother her.
Nick, who could have made his father proud by joining him in the family business, doesn't really seem to want to do anything - not get a job, not get a flat of his own, not even consider some kind of further education. Reading over my description of Nick just now makes me think I probably would encounter some kind of personality clash if I met him in real life, but there is something so great about Kris Marshall's performance as the character that makes me wish that - if I had an older brother - I would want one just like that.
And then there's Janey. A lot of people don't seem to like her, even her father Ben has been quoted in the series as calling her "that air-headed shopping machine from Hell", but I think she's an interesting character. Very self-centred, very fashion-orientated, the only reason she want to go to university ("What's the one with all the clubs?") is because it's the only way she can leave home without entering the world of paid employment. A novel approach to leaving home if ever there was one.
Michael is probably the most intelligent of the whole lot. He certainly seems it - watch out for a shot of him with a rabbit where Ben tells him he looks like a Bond villain. It would have been very easy to make Michael a one-dimensional character - having established his character as the brain of the family, it could have been that the writers decided there was no need to expand his characterisation any further, but they did. He still gets into girls, he still experiments with illegal substances, he even sells presents at a family wedding on eBay.
This is no normal family. They're certainly not boring, and with the cast of supporting characters around them, I don't think they ever will be. The three main supporting characters, when Ben can find a dental assistant willing to stick around long enough to assist him, are his hippie dental assistant (who plays "Song of the Narwhal" in the surgery), a worryingly childlike new colleague Roger upstairs and Ben's hapless distant cousin Abi, who ends up in Casualty with a never-ending scarf wrapped round her hand the first time we meet her.
Ben is about as far away from the stereotypical father as you can get. He isn't proud of his kids - at one point he actually says of his eldest son, "Why did we have him?". He hates his job, he hates the people he works with and he almost seems to hate the life fate has meant him to live. Susan isn't much of the perfect housewife, either. She can't cook to save her life, but it never seems to bother her.
Nick, who could have made his father proud by joining him in the family business, doesn't really seem to want to do anything - not get a job, not get a flat of his own, not even consider some kind of further education. Reading over my description of Nick just now makes me think I probably would encounter some kind of personality clash if I met him in real life, but there is something so great about Kris Marshall's performance as the character that makes me wish that - if I had an older brother - I would want one just like that.
And then there's Janey. A lot of people don't seem to like her, even her father Ben has been quoted in the series as calling her "that air-headed shopping machine from Hell", but I think she's an interesting character. Very self-centred, very fashion-orientated, the only reason she want to go to university ("What's the one with all the clubs?") is because it's the only way she can leave home without entering the world of paid employment. A novel approach to leaving home if ever there was one.
Michael is probably the most intelligent of the whole lot. He certainly seems it - watch out for a shot of him with a rabbit where Ben tells him he looks like a Bond villain. It would have been very easy to make Michael a one-dimensional character - having established his character as the brain of the family, it could have been that the writers decided there was no need to expand his characterisation any further, but they did. He still gets into girls, he still experiments with illegal substances, he even sells presents at a family wedding on eBay.
This is no normal family. They're certainly not boring, and with the cast of supporting characters around them, I don't think they ever will be. The three main supporting characters, when Ben can find a dental assistant willing to stick around long enough to assist him, are his hippie dental assistant (who plays "Song of the Narwhal" in the surgery), a worryingly childlike new colleague Roger upstairs and Ben's hapless distant cousin Abi, who ends up in Casualty with a never-ending scarf wrapped round her hand the first time we meet her.