Ffizz Sitcom Review
- peter etherington
- Mar 23
- 9 min read
Updated: 18 hours ago
Is this booze-soaked sitcom maturing like fine wine or was it corked from the start? I review Ffizz through a modern sitcom-writing lens, but also through the goggles of a seasoned wine pro. And I've got an admission to make, too.
Ffizz is a studio sitcom about the foibles of the wine industry. Welcome to the centre of my Venn diagram. But since airing on ITV in the late ‘80s, the show has faded into obscurity. It never even had an outing on UKTV Gold, and they’d show any old shite. When I learned of its existence a couple of years ago, and the existence of a two-series DVD, I ordered a copy faster than you can say Puligny Montrachet.
Yes, there will be more wine references. Strap in.
What's all the Ffizz about?
Ffizz was written by Richard Fegan and Andrew Norriss, who would go on to create The Brittas Empire. That’s some serious sitcom pedigree, and the very different nature of the two shows speaks to the writers’ versatility, but Ffizz didn’t enjoy anywhere near as much success as Brittas. I’m going to look at why, and I’ve got an admission to make, but first, let me set the scene.
Ffizz centres on Jack Mowbray and Hugo Walker, two posh chaps from the upper echelons of the wine trade, played expertly by Richard Griffiths and Benjamin Whitrow. They swan around in the boardroom of fictional London wine importer Mowbray & Crofts, and due to their lofty status they’ve scarcely done a day's work in their lives.
For these lifelong bon vivants, life is a conveyor belt of lavish lunches and posh parties, but that’s about to change. A cashflow crisis at Mowbray & Crofts forces the bank to install their own man in the boardroom, meaning Jack and Hugo will have to start pulling their weight. Or at least pretend to. Let the sitcom fun begin!
And it did, for a while, but Ffizz wasn't a smash hit with ITV's audience. To the commissioner’s credit, they gave it a second season to help it find its feet, but the public weren’t game and the cork was pulled.
The writers were understandably devastated. When recalling the show on his website, Andrew Norriss lays bare the hurt it caused.
“Of all the things I ever wrote, this was the one that made me cry at how it just never came off the screen the way it was meant to. It should have done. It starred the amazing Richard Griffiths and was produced by John Howard Davies (who directed Fawlty Towers) – but it just didn’t get off the ground. Richard Fegen and I wrote two series before they pulled the plug in 1988 and it still upsets me to think about it.”
But why didn’t it land? I have a theory and I’ll share it in due course, but I think it’s worth looking at what the show does well first.
Vintage comedy
The one thing I can’t fault Ffizz on is authenticity. During my time in the wine trade, I worked in some of London’s poshest postcodes, so believe me when I say the dialogue and wine references ring true. Lesser writers might have tried to bluff these details, but Fegan and Norriss clearly knew this world and felt no need to shirk the detail. The prop master, on the other hand, clearly wasn't an expert and must be chastised for their use of incorrect bottle shapes. Bordeaux in a Burgundy-shaped bottle? Quelle horreur!
I also have to applaud the way Ffizz doesn’t talk down to its audience. If you get the obscure wine reference, bully for you, but if you don’t, you can be sure it’s all part of the exclusive little world the characters inhabit. I remember American sitcom writer Ken Levine saying that he and the writers on Cheers and Frasier called these kinds of references ‘one-percenters’, because only one per cent of the audience would get them, but they kept them in for the sake of authenticity.
Ffizz wasn’t a hit with audiences in the late ‘80s, but audiences can be wrong: Two Broke Girls ran for 138 episodes! So is it worth another look? Will the characters and storylines grab modern viewers by the corkscrew?
This will come down to personal taste.
I really like Ffizz, and not just because its subject matter tickles my tastebuds. The stories are fun and the writing is quippy and erudite, to the point that some great lines go over the studio audience’s head. Ffizz needed the kind of studio audience that turned up to tapings of Yes Minister, who wouldn’t have missed a beat. I also like that the pacing of the show is slower than modern sitcoms. The director and actors don’t seem in a hurry to get through the material, blessing the viewer with time to soak in the ambience.
But is it too slow for its own good? Ffizz would certainly jar with viewers who are more attuned to the whirlwind pacing of modern shows like Big Bang Theory. But you have to remember that studio sitcoms were slower in the twentieth century. Just think of the unhurried style of Steptoe and Son, which was full of poignant silences and all the better for it.
The opening seconds of the first episode of Ffizz give us a window into the pacing of the show. Jack Mowbray is tasting wine in the boardroom and the audience sits through thirty seconds with scarcely a laugh or a line of dialogue. Thirty seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but in the world of television, it’s an aeon. This stands out to me because it’s the opposite of everything today’s writers and directors are taught.
Rightly or wrongly, today’s sitcoms are expected to be punchy laugh-fests from the very first line. Entertainment options are plentiful and shows have to grab viewers’ attention in the blink of an eye. Admit it, you’ve watched milliseconds of a Netflix preview and thought: “Nope.” This is the fickle world modern sitcoms inhabit.
But don’t press ‘skip’ on Ffizz just yet, because this show is a lot of fun.
Uncle Monty Rides Again
The sitcom’s masthead is bon vivant Jack Mowbray, played by Richard Griffiths. Fans of Withnail and I will recognise a lot of Uncle Monty in Jack Mowbray, only without Monty’s fetish for “firm young carrots,” if you get my meaning. Withnail had filmed a year earlier, so it must have been like putting on a comfortable old shoe for Griffiths.
The supporting cast are good fun, too. Benjamin Whitrow has a little sparkle in his eye as he delivers the understated lines of affable man-child Hugo Walker, and Felicity Montagu plays Jack’s Sloane Ranger niece Griselda with the posh drawl of a young Princess Di. Felicity Montagu would later find fame as Alan Partridge’s long-suffering sidekick, Lynn.
The humour is mostly dry and quippy, but there are moments of slapstick and physical comedy, too. Griffiths’ and Whitrow’s business in their undersized billiards room is up there with some of the best physical comedy studio sitcom can offer. It all looks so natural for the actors. I also like that Ffizz’s best lines aren’t always saved for the stars of the show. The bank manager, played by patrician character actor Roger Brierley, reels off barbs with a wit as dry as Muscadet.
Bank Manager: “The money’s all gone.”
Jack: “Where?”
Bank Manager: “Well, as an educated guess, I’d say you’ve spent it.”
Why wasn't Ffizz a hit?
So, now we reach the crux. Ffizz was funny, well-cast, and well-observed, so why wasn’t the show a hit? I liked it, and I have exquisite taste.
Situation comedy is, as the name suggests, all about the situation. Ffizz offers a glimpse into a rarefied and largely unrelatable world, which is the kind of thing that gives modern commissioners the heebie-jeebies, but that’s never enough to put audiences off; just look at the success of Frasier. So what’s the difference?
Relatable characters.
Frasier and Niles live on a pampered pedestal, just like Ffizz’s Jack and Hugo, but the broad appeal of Frasier comes courtesy of down-to-earth characters like Daphne, Roz, and Martin, who serve to, as Niles puts it, “prick the balloon of Frasier’s pomposity.” And they almost always have the final word.
Ffizz is missing meaningful everyman characters, so I suspect broad swathes of ITV’s audience struggled to relate. The only down-to-earth folk here are the serially abused underlings at Mowbray & Crofts, but they merely doff their caps and grumble under their breath.
It feels like the writers missed a trick in treading on the staff, particularly dogsbody Mrs Monahan, who had the potential to be like June Whitfield’s Mother character in Absolutely Fabulous, who absorbs the nonsense then cuts through it with a single well-observed barb. Ab Fab is another great example of a show where pretentious characters are thwarted and undermined by their more relatable counterparts.
I suppose you could argue that Alan, the young go-getter installed by the bank, offers viewers a fish-out-of-water perspective they can relate to, but Alan is a softcore yuppie, and yuppies were derided by large swathes of the population in the ‘80s, just like crypto bros today. Alan tries to challenge and thwart the main characters, but he always gets steamrolled by them, making him a bit of a wet blanket, sadly.
The other thing missing from Ffizz’s lead characters is motivation. Jack and Hugo don’t have any goal other than maintaining the status quo and keeping the party going. While this trait rings true where upper-class twits are concerned, it doesn’t give you much to hang your hat on when you’re trying to create engaging television characters.
The best protagonists are always grasping for something that’s slightly out of reach, usually as a result of their innate character flaws.
Basil Fawlty is desperate for a higher class of guest at Fawlty Towers, but he can’t stop being rude to his guests. Harold Steptoe longs to escape life as a rag-and-bone man, but his low birth and naivety are a straightjacket. Del Boy wants to be a millionaire, but his crooked get-rich-quick schemes always backfire through lack of foresight.
In order for Ffizz to have become a sitcom classic, Jack and Hugo needed some unobtainable goals to frustrate them, and the show needed some relatable characters to broaden its appeal. In retrospect, these omissions seem like glaring mistakes.
Now, time for my admission… I’ve made exactly the same mistakes and on almost exactly the same show.
My admission
Once upon a time, inspired by my time in the wine trade, I wrote a pilot script for a studio sitcom called Vines, which was set in an ancient little wine shop somewhere in London.
In 2015, Karl Rooney elected to produce and direct Vines at ITV’s London Studios as a training exercise for up-and-coming studio talent. This all came about at the last minute, and there was virtually no budget, but within a couple of weeks, the show was cast, rehearsed, and filmed in front of a live audience.
The lack of time between green-light and production meant the script wasn’t as razor-sharp as it could have been, but it was still funny and we had great fun making it. At the time, this felt like my big break in the sitcom business, but the pilot didn’t gain traction with television’s decision-makers and Vines fell into obscurity. In truth, it didn’t deserve to get on the air.
My main characters were very similar to Jack and Hugo in that their only motivation was maintaining the status quo of their boozy life in the wine shop. They also treated people like garbage, making them rather unlikable.
My everyman character came in the shape of the shop owner’s neophyte niece, played by the desperately underrated Lisa Depuis, who arrived to turn the business around despite knowing nothing about wine. But that wasn’t enough on its own, and because Vines starred two weird blokes in an odd little shop, it was considered too similar to Black Books.
Wait a minute. Two wine-industry layabouts? A new-arrival character who wants to turn the business around? I wrote Ffizz! Only a quarter of a century later.
Hand on heart, when I wrote Vines, I had no idea of Ffizz’s existence. Vines was written in around 2013 and filmed in 2015, while the Wikipedia page for Ffizz was only created in 2017 and the DVD was released in 2018. Yet, undeniably, the two shows are very similar.
Vines didn’t make it into production, and barring some plucky TV commissioner asking me to rewrite it and go again, it probably never will. But the experience taught me a lot and I’m so happy that I got to see it brought to life.
I can also take solace from the fact that following the demise of Ffizz, Richard Fegan and Andrew Norriss went on to write The Brittas Empire, a legendary sitcom full of odd yet relatable characters. I don’t know what my Brittas Empire will be, perhaps my vintage sitcom set in a country pub, but first, British TV commissioners will need to start putting studio sitcoms back on the air. But that’s a story for another day.
If you like the sound of Ffizz then treat yourself to the DVD. I’ve watched my copy twice now. And if you’re a TV commissioner and would like to talk about studio sitcoms, I’m all ears. Someone’s going to bring them back, it may as well be you (and me).
I hope you enjoyed my Ffizz sitcom review. If you liked my writing, or you need a sitcom writer for your next project, drop me a line.