CHANNEL 4'S 'FRIDAY NIGHT DINNER' VS.
REALITY

I was pleasantly surprised when my friend approached me to write this article. I am not Jewish, and my religious experience, until I moved to university, was limited generally to low-grade Christianity, encouraged by a school which cited “Christian morals” as a unifying ideology. Yet as I grew older, sitting through thrice-weekly services became more challenging for me, feeling the increasingly narrow religious identity vindicated in these services unreflective of my personal beliefs. Many of my peers, becoming more certain of their own personal values, shared this same consciousness of an alienation from what was supposed to be a celebration of togetherness, but rather often focussed on often divisive themes that ended up broadening ideological gulfs between us. 

It is only upon thinking about writing this article that it struck me how much my understanding of religious identities increased upon moving to university. My neighbour and I immediately became inseparable, in the way that those lucky enough to meet a best-friend in the first week of university do, and in the flurry of getting to know each other I began to understand that for her, her religious beliefs were central to her being in a way quite dissimilar from the low-temperature religion I had previously encountered. My friend particularly celebrated Friday Night Dinner, explaining how in the face of first-term homesickness it offered a sense of familiarity and closeness. 

In both an attempt to familiarise myself with what Friday Night Dinner actually is, and to procrastinate my work, I watched Channel 4’s ‘Friday Night Dinner’. I have since attended Friday Night Dinner with my friend’s family, an experience I am very grateful to have had. Approached to write this article, my friend suggested tackling a question I had asked her, puzzle-struck, many times in those first few weeks; is there any similarity between the programme and the actual event? 

Sit-coms often rely on the humour of hyperbole, and I found this was the most distorting difference between the show and the reality. Interruptions to the familial dinner are central to each episode, from a distraught Aunty Val desolate about the state of her marriage, to the cantankerous piano-tuner smashing the instrument, to the odd-ball Jim who has become perhaps the most notorious nightmare-neighbour ever. A great deal of Friday Night Dinner’s humour begins with the sound of a doorbell and our anticipation as to who it will be this time, in such a way hinged upon the interruption of the family dinner, which never once runs smoothly from start to finish. 

Yet in reality, I found much of the sanctity of Friday Night Dinner to come from spending an evening without disruption. Whilst modern life is filled with the interjections that add such comedic value to the series, I realise that now, looking back, the Friday Night Dinner I attended is one of the only meals I can look back on as entirely uninterrupted. Unlike Adam and Johnny’s antics, not once did I look at my phone; no nightmare neighbour popped round in a Jim-esque commotion; no last minute baby-sitting arrangements added a Machiavellian eight-year-old to the mix. The value of this smoothness, this occasion of spending uninterrupted hours with friends and family, I found to be that it stimulated conversations often left unfinished at normal meals when the telephone goes off, or the doorbell rings, or something really interesting comes up on the telly. No settling back into your chair and muttering of “where were we” can replace the level of emotional intimacy stimulated by evenings spent fully together, and I found that I was wholly there, not with my mind on my supervision essay or the impeding Christmas vacation, but enjoying the hours of togetherness with these people.  

And in thinking about this togetherness, something clicked; that for all Friday Night Dinner distorts the realities of the event, it does a rather splendid job of portraying a family who find sanctity in being together. It is a task that only very successful family-orientated programmes achieve to cultivate a familial ambiance between characters, yet Friday Night Dinner manages to do so in a way that is almost eerily authentic. Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal make convincing brothers, from insulting nicknames to the almost reflex playfighting, and the disturbed look they often shoot at their on-screen father’s unrefined, dad-like individualities is definitely a familiar one. Such a closeness implies a family that spend this special time together and cherish it as one of the week’s highlights. 

Yet perhaps what strikes me as the most manifest parallel is that this sacred evening of togetherness is in no way exclusive, but rather hospitality and genuine warmth is extended to every friend, neighbour, and other eccentric who turns up on the Goodman’s doorstep. I will refrain from comparing my own appearance at Friday Night Dinner to Jim’s (I’d like to think my ‘shaloms’ were a little more conservatively scattered) but the generosity and kindness extended to me over that evening, and the warmness and openness I was accepted with made me realise that the cornerstone of this religious experience is togetherness. At the start of this article, I recalled the feeling of ostracism I experienced in some school sermons. As someone who is, at a push, agnostic, it is unrealistic for me to experience Godly fulfilment in the practice of religious ceremony. Yet on a human level, I still strive for many of the values I remember listed in those sermons; charity, kindness, warmth, respect, compassion, and most importantly, togetherness. For all its acidic humour, Friday Night Dinner hints at these underlying values, paying tribute to them subtly in characters’ relationships and actions. And it is those same values which characterise the experience of Friday Night Dinner I was lucky enough to share.