Charm can get you a long way in life and Stacey & Joe (BBC One), the fly-on-the-wall documentary series about Stacey Solomon, her husband Joe Swash and her family, has oodles of it.
Stacey and Joe and their kids and their ducks and their dogs are all intensely watchable, likeable and, at times hilarious. Thank God that they are because without their guileless affability and infectious good humour the programme they give their names to would be lost. But I guess that’s the point.
The series evolved from the couple’s infectious bickering in Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out (Joe, although not part of the team, has guested). Obviously, if you present a show about sorted-out lives then people will expect your own to be well put together. The idea behind Stacey & Joe is that theirs, actually, is not, but hey-ho, life’s like that and we carry on.
It’s a thin premise, just watching a family living their lives, one made more complex by the fact that at this stage in reality TV’s evolution everyone knows that all supposed fly-on-the-wall television is edited for effect. Moreover, this is the second series of S&J, which means that keen-eyed viewers, in fact any viewers, will start to spot the emerging sinkholes where the producers have run out of ideas. It stands to reason that a programme that simply follows someone’s daily life would eventually become tedious (or maybe that’s just a reflection of my daily life).
Add to that the ethics of putting your entire family on camera for light entertainment as well as the obvious similarities with other series – in this series Joe is building a lake, like Jeremy Clarkson did; Stacey is flogging her fledgling haircare brand to buyers across a boardroom table, like The Apprentice; Joe is on his ADHD journey, like in all those documentaries about ADHD journeys; the kids spend most of their time eye-rolling their parents, just like most kids – and Stacey & Joe is certainly not going to win awards for innovation.
Mostly it doesn’t matter. Staged soap it may be, but Solomon and Swash have that ineffable on-camera magic, able to render the quotidian and the dull and the daft somehow riveting.
Plus, it is funny. I’ve been watching a lot of new comedy recently but nothing has made me laugh as much as Solomon’s young daughter Rose drawing a picture of her daddy that looks, if you’re feeling generous, like a rocket, and if you’re not, like a big pink penis. The older children are not feeling generous. They fall about. Rose looks perturbed, whereupon Zach, 17, chimes in with the immortal emollient, “We’re laughing… because it looks so good.”
You’ll be laughing too, most likely in spite of yourself. You’ll probably also be delighted when Stacey catches a fish and devastated when the dog gets ill. Stacey & Joe is at base an empty vessel, but it’s one that is filled with charm.
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