There are television programmes that divide critics because they are complicated, challenging pieces of art demanding careful interpretation.
And then there’s Alley Cats, Ricky Gervais’s animated comedy about a gang of feral cats living in a derelict building, watching television, fighting, shagging, scavenging, contemplating their own mortality and, occasionally, licking their bollocks. Or someone else’s. Some critics have apparently been horrified to discover that it contains knob jokes. I’m not entirely sure what they were expecting. ‘Downton Tabby’, perhaps.
Si and I binge-watched all six episodes and I laughed my head off. Not polite little chuckles, either. Proper, stupid laughter. The sort where you have to rewind because you missed what happened next. And then, irritatingly, the bloody thing made me emotional. Because underneath the swearing, sex, bodily functions, violence and relentless base humour, Alley Cats has an enormous amount of heart and that, I think, is the bit getting lost amongst some of the more gleefully appalled reviews.
The premise is beautifully simple. Gus and his gang are feral cats occupying a derelict building and living their peculiar little lives alongside the human world without ever really belonging to it. They watch television. They discuss sex. They fight. They eat whatever they can get. They misunderstand things. They contemplate death. They are, in other words, cats. And that is precisely why the crudity works. These aren’t human characters who happen to have been drawn with whiskers and tails. They are cats who have been given the ability to talk.
Cats do not have our elaborate social conventions concerning bodies, sex or personal dignity. A cat will wash its genitals in the middle of your living room while maintaining eye contact with your grandmother. They don’t care. So when Alley Cats swings wildly from a conversation about death to a joke about somebody’s knob, it doesn’t feel nearly as incongruous as it perhaps should. In fact, I can completely believe that’s how cats would think. Food. Sex. Territory. Fighting. Warmth. Danger. Friendship. Death. Bollocks. It all occupies roughly the same philosophical plane.
And then Kitten arrives.
The gang find her and agree to help her get home, and somewhere along the way Gus begins to change. Our scruffy feral fleabag develops into something altogether more complicated: a cat capable of responsibility, loyalty and genuine tenderness. It would have been incredibly easy to make that transformation mawkish but it isn’t. The programme doesn’t suddenly stop being filthy so we know Something Important Is Happening. Gus doesn’t become a different character simply because we’re being invited to care about him. The knob jokes don’t politely leave the room while the emotional music starts.
The tenderness exists alongside the stupidity. Which is much closer to real life anyway.
There are some genuinely touching scenes in Alley Cats, particularly as the relationships between the characters deepen and the programme begins poking at mortality. These are animals living without much security. Their world can be funny, but it can also be frightening and brutally temporary. Death therefore doesn’t feel bolted on as an excuse for Gervais to indulge his familiar existential preoccupations. It belongs there. Feral animals live considerably closer to death than most of us would like to contemplate. And somehow Alley Cats manages to explore that without forgetting that its protagonists are also ridiculous little furry bastards.
Olive, in particular, stole the show for me. There is something wonderfully affecting about her, and she is part of the reason I don’t buy the argument that Alley Cats is simply lazy shock comedy. You can throw all the filth you like at a cartoon, but making somebody genuinely care about an animated street cat requires rather more than a collection of knob jokes. And I cared. Quite a lot, actually. Which was inconvenient.
Then there’s the television watching, which is such a beautifully cat-like conceit. These animals sit outside human civilisation peering into it, absorbing fragments of what we’re doing without necessarily possessing the context required to understand any of it. Which, come to think of it, isn’t entirely unlike social media.
And that brings us rather neatly to the reviews.
Oh, Ricky. You knew, didn’t you? Of course you bloody knew.
At this stage Ricky Gervais and his critics appear to exist in a perfectly functioning symbiotic ecosystem.
Gervais makes something deliberately provocative.Critics announce that Ricky Gervais has gone TOO FAR. Gervais points out that they’ve announced Ricky Gervais has gone TOO FAR. People become furious that Gervais has pointed out that they’ve become furious. Articles are written about the furious response to the response to the thing that was apparently too offensive in the first place. Everybody gets clicks. Netflix gets viewers. Gervais gets publicity. And somewhere, presumably, a cartoon cat continues licking its bollocks.
The reaction to Alley Cats is particularly funny because some of the complaints concern exactly the things you’d expect to find in a cartoon about a gang of feral cats.
It’s crude! They’re feral cats.
They’re obsessed with sex! They’re feral cats.
They fight! They’re feral cats.
They talk about their genitals! Have you ever actually met a cat?
I appreciate that humour is subjective. If you don’t find Alley Cats funny, you don’t find it funny. Fair enough. Nobody should be sentenced to six episodes of a comedy they hate simply to prove they’re sufficiently broad-minded. But being scandalised by the base humour seems rather more peculiar. If you find a reference to a cat licking its bollocks offensive in a comedy about feral cats, I’m afraid I don’t know what will save you.
Perhaps The Antiques Roadshow.
Although I wouldn’t risk an episode involving a pair of Georgian brass finials.
And this is where I think some criticism of Gervais becomes tangled up with criticism of the actual programme. There are people who dislike Ricky Gervais. There are people who really dislike Ricky Gervais. There are people who appear to wake every morning, stretch, drink a coffee and check whether Ricky Gervais has said anything they can be furious about before breakfast. And Gervais knows it. More importantly, he knows exactly how to play with it.
I’m not suggesting every negative review of Alley Cats is calculated Ricky-bait. Plenty of people will simply think it’s rubbish. That’s comedy. Somebody’s masterpiece is somebody else’s reason for reaching for the remote. But there is something undeniably hilarious about watching the familiar machinery crank into action again. Because outrage and Gervais have become mutually sustaining. Critic pokes Ricky. Ricky pokes critic. Critic is appalled that Ricky poked back. Ricky’s audience laughs. Another article appears. Netflix quietly counts the views. At some point you have to wonder who is actually playing whom.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Alley Cats so much. It doesn’t pretend to be respectable. It is rude, ridiculous, vulgar and occasionally spectacularly childish. It’s also warm, unexpectedly thoughtful and genuinely sad in places. Gus’s journey from mangy self-interested survivor to a cat willing to help Kitten find her way home gives the story an emotional backbone that I wasn’t expecting. The friendship between these assorted feline degenerates gradually becomes something worth caring about.
And Olive…Well. Olive is the best of the gang.
I went into Alley Cats expecting Ricky Gervais doing Ricky Gervais things with animated cats. I got that. Obviously. What I wasn’t expecting was to become quite so invested in the lives of a collection of filthy cartoon animals living in a derelict building. I laughed. I cared about them. I was genuinely moved.
And then somebody made another knob joke and ruined the moment. Exactly as a cat would.
So, yes, I loved Alley Cats. If you hated it, that’s absolutely fine. I respect your opinion. And I apologise unreservedly for enjoying it.
Not.
