‘Alley Cats’ Review – Paws Down the Worst Thing Ricky Gervais Has Ever Done

It takes an effort to remember this now, but Ricky Gervais made The Office. Admittedly, he didn’t make it alone, and the lanky ghost of Stephen Merchant loomed over the lesser but still excellent Extras before being exorcised completely, kick-starting a downward trajectory for Gervais that can’t help but make one wonder who had all the talent in the first place. Admittedly, I was keen on After Life, which is perhaps just as well, since Alley Cats – hands down the worst thing he has ever done – basically reunites the entire cast.

The thing about Gervais’s latter-career projects, After Life included, is that they’re built around him playing himself and espousing his own opinions. But between his years-long film and TV career, landmark podcasting run, and ever-worsening stand-up specials, everyone knows his opinions. About everything. It isn’t as if they’re evolving; they’re basically identical to what they were back when he was sharing them on XFM, just without the advantage of Karl Pilkington being there.

Alley Cats could have done with Pilkington to liven up the usual crowd, playing their usual archetypes, now just rendered in four-legged form by serviceable animation that Gervais has repeatedly bragged was drawn over already-recorded, largely improvised ensemble dialogue. You don’t need me to tell you this, since it’s very obvious from the start. All the conversations are just the cast screaming over one another and calling each other the C-word while Gervais goes off on tangents about his personal pet hates. Sometimes he breaks out laughing in his inimitable way, and a new line starts playing on top of it because nobody could be bothered to edit it properly.

Gervais is technically playing Gus, a ginger cat built suspiciously like him, but it’s basically just Gervais, with all the same viewpoints on hunting, religion, and animals that he has been going on about for years. Gus is the nominal leader of a group of cats including Puke (David Earl), Fang (Andrew Brooke), and Ponce (Tom Basden), the only character I liked since he realises the others are all useless, misanthropic weirdos and keeps calling them out on it. Ponce’s real name is Rupert, and he’s the only member of the gang who lives with a family, gets regular meals, and has been neutered (you can see where the nickname comes from).

There’s also Olive (Diane Morgan), the cat that’s somehow even more stupid than the others, and Kitten (Jo Hartley), a… kitten whose mission to get home forms the only thing resembling a plot in Alley Cats, as well as giving Gervais an excuse to wheel out his trademark washy sentimentalism as Gus begins to realise that there’s more to cat-life that sitting around watching reality TV and moaning. This is bad news for the audience, since it means more of Gervais’s slightly sophomoric approach to emotion and kindness-is-magic proselytising.

This works worse here than it usually does because Alley Cats is so determinedly nihilistic. There’s no room to tell a proper story since at least half of every twenty-minute episode is devoted to Gervais ranting about something, so all the faux-emotional moments that are wedged into the margins are totally unmoving since they don’t have any development or payoff. There’s a bit where Gus’s mother dies after only having been introduced in a single prior scene, and then it’s moved on from so quickly that it’s easy to forget she was ever in the show in the first place. And everything is like this.

The lone bright spot – aside from Ponce, which is understandable since the entire selling point of the character is that he’s not like the others – is Gus’s relationship with Lara (Kerry Godliman), since Gervais remains pretty good at articulating the pathetic frailty of the male ego and the “women as adults, men as children” theme that so completely defined The Office. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Tim and Dawn, but it has shades of the better, more observant show that Alley Cats might have been had anyone been bothered to make it (or if anyone could rein Gervais in). Alas, what we’re left with is more on-brand self-indulgence. At least it doesn’t last long.