Amelie Davies and Ethaniel Davy in Chicken Town

CHICKEN TOWN
Directed by Richard Bracewell
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

THIS delightful English comedy doesn’t try to punch above its weight. Instead it finds humour in the everyday and with a cast that excel, Chicken Town is that rare thing: a very English comedy that doesn’t make you cringe at the telling of some home truths about a nation of shopkeepers.

This is a country of downplaying the big things and focusing on the minutiae of life – for example, the relaying of a neighbours driveway creates one set-to conversation that highlights how Richard Bracewell finds humour in the everyday.

In this instance, the shopkeeper happens to be two friends and their elderly neighbour, who by chance has grown a whopping great stash of high grade marijuana.

The action begins with a car accident that leads Jayce (Ethaniel Davy) to be wrongly sent to prison. He comes out after a 10 month stretch and is looking for answers. His best mate Lee (Ramy Ben Fredj) was the one responsible who Jayce took the fall for,and everyone in the town knows this, except Jayce.

Lee is the son of the area’s biggest employer, a chicken farmer called Matthews who is part of a criminal circle: Lee lives in a ramshackle caravan in a clay pit on the fathers manor. He is a somewhat tragic character.

After some preliminary intros and deadpan jokes, we meet Kev (Graham Fellowes), an allotment gardener who has inadvertently grown himself a crop of cannabis – who enlists Jayce and Paula (Amelie Davies) to flog the dope. Fellowes invented the character John Shuttleworth, as per the BBC Radio sitcom, and this role feels like it’s Shuttleworth’s brother. He channels a peculiarly old-man-little-Englander approach to life. Solid and steady, boring and reliable, unworldly but sensible.

When their dope-dealing plans are discovered by the local village idiots, who have designs on being gangsters, the trio’s plans take a wrong turn.

Set in the Fens of East England, the backwater setting presents a comic stage for the story to unfold. And it’s littered with jokes that reference the silliness of laconic dry humour: about Cash Converters and carriage clocks, about noisy neighbours, souped up Ford cars, business parks on civil war battlefields, and towns that progress has forgotten.

The film has at its heart concepts of family and community: the trio are possibly unlikely but that’s where the dramatic impetus and comedy stems from. Their alliance is heartwarming, funny and very silly indeed.