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The second series of Dinosaur opens on the Isle of Wight – a mere seven-hour drive and ferry ride away from our heroine’s beloved Glasgow. Oh dear. Nina (Ashley Storrie) is eight months into a dig, the job she took at the end of series one, and despite discovering a metazoic dung beetle and getting pally with a big American fella called Clayton who is so charming he can call her “Scotland” and get away with it, she’s homesick.
She is missing Lee, her almost-sort-of boyfriend who used to make her morning coffee outside the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where she worked in the palaeontology department (not with the dirty grave robbers over in antiquities). She is missing watching The Real Housewives with her sister, Evie, their takeaway Tuesdays and walks around the “wee dodgy parks in case we uncover a homicide”. She’s all set to go home when she is asked to stay on another year. Will she choose her precious old rocks, or head to the exact midpoint between the Isle of Wight and Glasgow to reunite with Lee? So begins the madcap rush (in a very slow buggy) to a park bench in Knutsford, and the happy return of this hilarious, heartwarming and covertly groundbreaking sitcom.
I say covertly because at first sight Dinosaur treads the same ground as every other British sitcom about loving yet dysfunctional families, regional quirks, a good dose of farce, and the requisite cringingly cute will-they-won’t-they storyline. But all this so-called normality is undercut by Nina’s autistic perspective. (The biggest joke being, of course, that it is neurotypicals who are too much.) Nina’s autism is both fundamental to every scene of Dinosaur, and not what it’s about at all. In this way, even among the welcome slew of shows centring autistic people, it feels refreshing, unique and devoid of thoughtless stereotypes.
And so to Glasgow via Knutsford, where – spoiler alert – Lee never shows up. Back home, everything has changed. Nina’s office at the museum has been moved, as has her desk to make way for a social pod and hydration station. Her local sandwich shop has stopped selling tuna melts because “no one likes hot tuna” and “we only served one a day to some woman who died last year”. “That was me!” Nina protests. A tuna meltdown, as Evie fondly calls it, nearly ensues. Once again, it’s the odd-couple dynamic between the sisters (closely followed by the adorable awkwardness between Nina and Lee) that makes the bones of Dinosaur really shine: their little finger hooks, sudden switches into Real Housewives accents and lightning fast Glasgow banter about boofing, bing bongs and big heids (and no, I’m not giving definitions – just watch it). Or when Nina is in distress and Evie simply says “weighted blanket?” Cut to Nina lying on a couch and Evie stretched out on top of her, weighing her down.
This series is more self-assured than the first, piling up the jokes about Mary Anning and childbirth, Gloria Steinem and the Tebay services off the M6, David Attenborough and a fruity book of short stories Nina wrote called Romancing the Bone. The ensemble cast are, again, top-notch. Nina’s feckless older brother, Bo, spends much of his time in the family shed, freaking out about getting Evie’s best friend, Amber, pregnant. Ranesh, Evie’s feminist husband, is up to the same old stuff – buying a dehydration machine to make fruit leathers and cooking pasta from a book by the pope. I love the portrayal of Declan, Nina’s older colleague, probably undiagnosed but certainly autistic. And Lee performs at an open mic (Amber: “Mediocre white men singing in public is one of my kinks – it’s the switch from delusional confidence to defeat”), singing a lovely toe-curling song whose chorus sums up the spirit of Dinosaur: “It doesn’t matter what you do / As long as what you do is true.”
Like Hackney in Starstruck, with which Dinosaur shares a sweet spiky messiness (though Dinosaur is more subversive, foul-mouthed, better) Glasgow is a major character. And Scotland’s biggest – and biggest-hearted –city, where I spent one of the best decades of my life, has never looked lovelier: all glossy tenement closes, tree-lined avenues and bougie bars. This is the other way in which Dinosaur is quietly radical. When do we ever get to see this Glasgow on the telly?
Both Dinosaur’s integrity and the Glaswegian intensity of its gag rate is down to its origins. It’s the co-creation of Storrie – who received her autism diagnosis in her early 30s and is the daughter of the comedian Janey Godley, who died between the first and second series – and Matilda Curtis, the daughter of the director Simon Curtis and the actor Elizabeth McGovern. It’s a show that came out of Storrie’s real life experience and is the product of close female collaboration. The outcome is a classic comedy full of light, shade and big feelings. As the mother of an autistic child myself, the simplest way I can put it is that it rings true, and gives me some big feelings of my own. In short, I love it.
