It’s a long time since ITV set the comedy world alight. The 1990s threw up some random highlights – Jeeves and Wooster, the ubiquitous Mr Bean – but the next decade was something of a sitcom wasteland until Derren Litten’s outrageously funny Benidorm pitched up. That was followed a mere six years later by Plebs (essentially: if The Inbetweeners were Romans) and job centre-based comedy The Job Lot, whose title’s feel of this-pun-dictated-the-entire-premise still causes me to break out in a cold sweat. Yet despite these shows being the broadcaster’s only notable contributions to the form this century, ITV comedy still feels like a distinctive subgenre, one defined by old-school story beats and all the edge of a bouncy ball.
Into this decidedly unradical template struts Jordan Gray, the singer turned standup who in 2022 became the first transgender person to headline the London Palladium with her Edinburgh-award nominated hit show Is It A Bird? With her new sitcom, the 36-year-old provides the mainstream comedy mould with fresh fodder. We first encounter our hero, Liv, via a parody of one of those cheesy 00s razor adverts: a silky dressing gown is dropped; blades glide along already spotless shins and armpits – but then this classy babe begins shaving her face and urinating in the sink. The punchline? Her longsuffering housemate Tom (Thomas Gray) has been sitting on the toilet the whole time.
From that point on, you suspect Transaction is honouring a sitcom style powered by an endless stream of silly, semi-predictable jokes and ludicrously contrived storylines in exchange for the chance to present a nuanced portrait of a transgender woman at a time when dehumanisation remains rife. Liv is charismatic and clever, but she is also lazy, workshy, irritating, jealous and selfish. These are all positives, by the way – anyone who thinks progressive representation in comedy involves nice characters being nice to each other all day long is sorely mistaken.
Transaction’s major arc involves Tom’s employer, a supermarket called Pellocks, which has caused controversy by inadvertently plastering “lady boys get out” on a billboard. Obviously this isn’t remotely plausible, but such creaky plotting does give stressed-out, well-meaning boss Simon (Nick Frost) a reason to hire Liv – who he somehow knows is Tom’s flatmate – in an effort to quell the protest outside. Once she realises she can’t be fired (the optics would be terrible), Liv decides to be an awful employee. But she does disarm the indignant crowds with an irreverent speech. “When I told my dad I was becoming a woman,” she announces solemnly, “he said I could never pull it off. I said I’d probably get a doctor to do that bit, Father.”
You could envisage a variation on this joke being told, wince-inducingly, by a blokey comic decades ago. Coming from Gray, it feels like snort-inducingly harmless fun. That said, walking the line between enlightened and unreconstructed humour is not always so straightforward. Liv’s other colleagues are conscientious Millie (the charming Francesca Mills), who has dwarfism, and “beefy Linda” (an impeccably deadpan Kayla Meikle), who is Black. When Liv declares that the trio resemble “the setup to a joke that would get you uninvited to Christmas dinner,” moments after delivering a duff quip about Millie’s height, it all starts to feel less bracingly modern.
Yet there is something impressively sophisticated going on here, too. Liv refuses to pay Tom rent, claiming she’s saving up for “gender realignment” surgery. Tom is sceptical: “I thought you didn’t want a vagina? You said you were scared of a bee flying up in it.” Indeed, Liv is later horrified to discover Simon has started a fundraiser for said surgery. Transaction’s brashness doesn’t stop it discussing what has traditionally been one of the more delicate – and taboo – elements of the trans experience. Then again, Gray has long had something to say on this topic: her 2022 appearance on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live saw her play the piano with her penis, resulting in 1,500 Ofcom complaints.
It’s part of a refreshing rebellion against the status quo offered by this show, but Transaction remains markedly retro overall: at its core, this is a broad comic caper about some unrealistically stupid people messing about in a supermarket. In later episodes, the narrative sprawls into generic workplace plotlines: crushes, rivalries, minor slapstick disasters. It’s a bit dull – not something you could ever say about Liv herself, whose humour is puerile but punchy and unexpected. Instead, I am left wondering what Gray might have made outside the confines of an old-fashioned sitcom on a channel that tries to crowd-please, but rarely manages to make history.