In Channel 4’s Pushers, thirtysomething Emily, who has cerebral palsy, has just suffered through the indignity of a benefits assessment. Every statement she makes is received with an impassive expression from her case worker, who’s not convinced that Emily’s “considerable pain” is actually “considerable” enough.
Afterwards, she bumps into an old classmate in the non-accessible loos (the disabled toilets are, inevitably, out of order), who regales her with an intriguing business proposition. If her benefit is about to be cut, then why doesn’t she make up the shortfall by helping him shift a massive consignment of cocaine? “The ideal drug mule is a good old girl with an obvious disability,” he says. Of course, the sensible answer would be “sorry, no, I never make narcotics-related business deals in public bathrooms”. But that would make for a very boring sitcom – and Pushers, which was co-created by comedian Rosie Jones, who also stars as Emily, is anything but.
After their accidental toilet rendezvous, Emily starts doing the odd job for her former school pal Ewan (Ryan McParland, who you might recognise from a brief but scene-stealing turn in Derry Girls as an Irish Traveller). And despite having possibly the most obtrusive manner of any drug dealer who’s ever tried out the profession, cheerily yelling her greetings to her clients and mixing up her drop-offs in the wrong wheelie bins, she gets the job done. Just.
As a disabled woman, Emily is overlooked to the point of invisibility. No one suspects she’s an aspiring Escobar, so the joke’s on them when she manages to subvert her perceived vulnerability to get the police to look the other way. Soon, she and Ewen are the ringleaders of a gang of co-conspirators, many of them also disabled, and they start to use the charity where Emily works to give the scheme a veneer of plausible deniability. Happily, her boss Jo is entirely oblivious to this; she’s far more concerned with her singular goal of ensuring that Soho Farmhouse has truly accessible bathrooms.
The fish-out-of-water sitcom is hardly a new concept; watching an unlikely bunch attempt to pull off something they’re arguably ill-equipped for is a failsafe of the genre. But Jones’s show, which was co-written with Peter Fellows, who’s previously worked on Armando Iannucci series such as Veep and Avenue 5, brings plenty of madcap energy to this trope. There’s a deft balance between silly, laugh-out-loud gags (“What kind of animal is an UHT?” Ewen ponders while contemplating a milk carton, only for Emily to inform him that he needn’t worry, as they’re extinct) and clever observational comedy that skewers attitudes to disability.
The cast of characters, too, is endearingly drawn, each with their own specific obsessions and foibles. Emily’s colleague Hope (Libby Mai) reckons she’s cut out for the drug lord life because she’s high up in the official The Bill fan club (later on in the series, there’s some great physical comedy from Mai when Hope appears to ascend to another spiritual plane entirely while dancing to an electro remix of that show’s theme tune). And McParland is brilliantly deadpan as Ewen, a misguided soul who essentially means well (even if he has a habit of referring to Emily’s disability as “cerebral paisley”) but keeps getting dragged off the straight and narrow.
As Emily starts to acquire a taste for power, the stakes inevitably get higher, but all the organised crime and close calls with rival dealers are zippily interwoven with bonkers interludes, like when the group attempts to convince a passer-by that they are in fact members of a local line-dancing troupe, rather than a wannabe OCG. The overall effect is a bit surreal in places, but always enjoyably so. For a first foray into sitcom writing for Jones, it’s remarkably assured. I’d happily spend plenty more seasons hanging out in the charity shop back room with this gang of improbable kingpins.
