FAMILY PORTRAIT (HERE WE GO)

The imperfect family has been a firm staple of TV comedy pretty much from the get go.

Whether it's 'The Flintstones' or 'The Cosby Show' or 'Modern Family' or across the Atlantic 'Till Death Do Us Part,' 'Only Fools and Horses' or 'Outnumbered,' sitcom writers have repeatedly mined the trials and tribulations of working or middle class families for laughs.

So the arrival of a new family, the Jessops on BBC1 in 'Here We Go' is just the continuation of a long sitcom tradition.

Written by cast member Tom Basden, Katherine Parkinson and Jim Howick play Rachel and Paul Jessop, the parents at the heart of a chaotic suburban southern English home.

Rachel is a harassed mum and the main breadwinner of the house - working as a recruitment consultant in a job she loathes.

Paul is a former Olympic archer who has lot his job teaching archery due to the pandemic and who is struggling to decide what route his career path should take.

However you suspect he quite likes mooching around the house.

The couple have two teenagers.

Their daughter, Freya Parks' Amy is a typically snarky late teen with uni in her sights, drifting through life with an on-off girlfriend, Mica Ricketts' Maya.

Jude Morgan Collie's Sam, their shy son, occasionally appears onscreen but mostly hides behind an array of cameras which he uses to capture their messy lives for a rather vague documentary project he's working on.

Rounding off the family unit is Alison Steadman's big hearted grandmother Sue and Basden's feckless Robin, who is Rachel's brother and has an on-off relationship of his own with Tori Allen-Martin's high maintenance Cherry.

As everything is being documented and edited by Sam, time shifts back in forth in each episode.

This means we often see the Jessops in a pickle and then using other clips filmed in the weeks leading up to the drama, Sam's footage explains how we got there.

The first episode sees the family celebrate Rachel's birthday with a rather underwhelming array of presents by eventually using a family voucher to an adventure park.

The next deals with Amy going for a job interview with a former classmate of Rachel's, while Paul takes up cycling and takes part in a school prize giving that goes disastrously.

Paul and Rachel are on a month long purge diet in the following episode in which Cherry and Robin run a salsa class and Sue buys an inflatable outdoor pool.

However the episode is mostly concerned about a family portrait by Mark Williams' local artist Frank that Rachel takes a dislike to because she thinks he has made her look too haggard and which she starts to alter.

The Jessops' next adventure finds them confronting a former archery competitor and Olympic bronze medalist, Tim Key's Ray about a video which suggests he might have cheated Paul out of a place on the team for the Beijing Games.

When Sue lands an Italian boyfriend, Vincenzo Ricotta's Alf in the next instalment, the family are invited to his restaurant, while Robin leans on Paul to investigate if Cherry has left him for an estate agent she met on a Buddhist meditation retreat.

Tempers fray, though, when one of the Jessops' restaurant guests, Ed Kear's Dean wants ketchup with his pizza and Rachel smuggles in limoncello which she thinks improves her ability to speak Italian.

In the final episode, Robin persuades the family to go on a camping holiday to the Cairngorms in Scotland, where Sam meets a girl in a distillery who gets him tongue tied and Amy considers heading off to Norway.

When Robin insists on going to Falkirk with Rachel's support, it soon becomes clear the brother and sister have an ulterior motive.

All of these episodes are standard family sitcom fare and Basden delivers a reasonably entertaining, if not wholly successful series but one with real potential.

Before 'Here We Go,' there was a pilot called 'Pandemonium' which aired over the Festive Season on BBC1 in December 2020 in which the Jessops adjusted to the upheaval caused by the COVID pandemic to their jobs and finances by going on a family holiday in Margate in October.

'Here We Go' builds on the dynamics of the pilot, with Parkinson and Howick delivering charming performances as very flawed parents.

They occasionally get to deliver very funny moments.

The former's finest hour comes in the portrait episode, while the latter's is the school prizegiving.

Steadman is as good as you'd expect as Sue, while Basden, Parks, Collie, Allen-Martin, Ricketts and Kear occasionally raise a wistful smile.

The guest appearances by Mark Williams and Tim Key also do not disappoint.

However at times 'Here We Go' just feels a little too safe.

As it charts the Jessops' imperfections, there just isn't the same edge you get with the Royles in 'The Royle Family,' the Goodmans in 'Friday Night Dinner' or the Quinns in 'Derry Girls'.

That may come but Basden's tendency to want to find a mini-victory for his characters amid the catalogue of failure - whether it is completing a hole of mini golf or Rachel launching into an impassioned burst of Italian - becomes just a little too formulaic.

Watching 'Here We Go,' you feel there is potentially a very good sitcom waiting to be cut loose.

Hopefully, Basden and director Will Sinclair will get another crack at it.

But they will really need to get to grips with its comic potential.

('Here We Go' was broadcast on BBC1 from April 29-June 3, 2022, with all episodes also immediately available on the BBC iPlayer).