Hunderby, review: 'cartoonishly grotesque'

Hunderby (Sky Atlantic), the darkly funny period sitcom written by Julia Davis (Nighty Night) and Barunka O’Shaughnessy, has returned. The first series parodied Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to breathtakingly twisted effect, delighting long-time fans of Davis’s characteristically unsettling work. It was a million miles from the primary-coloured slapstick of other mainstream sitcoms.

The first of the new series felt more steeped in Austen and Dickens than du Maurier, but it still required you to leave your sense of common decency at the door. The 18th-century estate of Hunderby is populated by a cantankerous old pastor, Edmund (Alex Macqueen), his malevolent housekeeper Dorothy (Davis), and a variety of other randy and hideous characters whose relationship changes with every melodramatic revelation.

The depths of bad taste were plumbed from the scatological to the psychologically messed-up, and included a few unsavoury rape jokes. Mostly, though, the ink-black humour was balanced just right, even if it was a little on the bracing side.

Although there was a welcome touch of vintage Blackadder to the best bits, with the script cloaking a variety of dirty jokes in flowery circumlocution, the script was hung entirely on this premise of filthy goings-on in a decadent period setting. After a while you started to wonder if it had anything else up its sleeve. There didn’t seem to be as much of the careful structuring that had underpinned the first series. “If I hear one more word about your rancid nethers…” said Edmund at one point, and after a while I knew how he felt.

But by the time Helene’s (Alexandra Roach) post-birth body was likened to “an exploded shark”, I’d got the giggles. It’s impossible to print the funniest lines, but the world that Davis and O’Shaughnessy have created was so cartoonishly grotesque that you had to laugh.