I had high hopes for Ricky Gervais’s new Netflix series, Alley Cats. Not that I had much cause to – the last time the bloke made me laugh was in 2007, when, in the last episode of Extras, his character, the struggling actor Andy Millman, entered Celebrity Big Brother and accidentally goes cruising with George Michael. I’m one of those woke snowflakes who thinks it isn’t remotely funny to mock disabled people, AIDS or trans women. This new series, though, was concerned with one of my greatest passions in life: cats. It had to be good. And how offensive can you make a cat, really?
But, as I should well know by now, it’s the hope that kills you. You’ve heard of the manosphere? Well, somehow, via the medium of cartoon cats lounging about in a derelict house watching TV, Gervais has created the Catosphere, made up of a gang of miserable, offensive, toxic cats who have nothing better to do than spout their diatribe all day. This is just an aimless Ricky Gervais podcast channeled through cartoon felines.
He voices the leader of the gang (shock), Gus, a boisterous tabby who loves nothing more than to rile up his mates. They are Fang (Andrew Brooke), the muscle who joins in with Gus’s insults; Puke (David Earle), a scroungy skinny cat who is obsessed with sex; and Olive (Diane Morgan), the only girl, who is therefore – of course she is – thick. They’re also joined by house cat Ponce (Tom Basden), whose homophobic slur of a name is directly tied to the fact he’s been castrated.
The plot is light, to say the least. When a kitten turns up at the cats’ hideout, they promise they’ll help to find her way back home. But over the six episodes, that only serves as a vehicle to get the cats out onto the street, where they just continue their incessant tirade.
‘Alley Cats’ is two hours of Gervais saying exactly what he wants (Photo: Netflix)And there’s no limit to how far these cats will go. Gandhi, fat children, people with nut allergies, people with AIDS, and bees are just a handful of the subjects Gervais attacks. It’s also – and there’s no gentle way to say this – utterly obsessed with anal sex (and often anal rape). Though it’s all a joke of course, a bit of a laugh, banter. How can you take seriously what cartoon cats are saying? Bloody hell, you can’t say anything these days, can you?!
Except you can – Alley Cats is two hours of Gervais saying exactly what he wants. But this time he’s not standing on a stage in front of thousands of fans – he’s voicing a cat on the even bigger platform of Netflix. If you are searching for proof that cancel culture isn’t real, then look no further than Gervais – one of the most offensive comedians on the planet, who enjoys a Netflix pay packet and is about to set off on a stand-up world tour (which will also eventually end up on Netflix).
It’s hard not to armchair-psychoanalyse Gervais through his cartoon cats. They have an extremely dim view of the world – humans are awful and evil, they are selfish, and as far as Gus is concerned, they should all die. From a homeless cat’s point of view, fair enough – he’s seen cats replaced by their owners, taken to be euthanised, and run over (Alley Cats continues Gervais’s preoccupation with death).
It’s hard not to armchair-psychoanalyse Gervais through his cartoon cats (Photo: Netflix)But that misanthropic world view doesn’t fit with the trite declarations of love of life that Gervais has Gus give to the kitten at the end of every episode. “Life is a gift,” he tells her, amongst various other crocheted platitudes that you’ll find on Etsy. We see him falling in love with a cat voiced by Kerry Godliman (a callback to Back to Life, in which she played his character’s dead wife), and at one point Gus even prays to God, despite Gervais’s consistent and insistent atheism.
Is this softer, sensitive soul the real Gervais? After all, when asked whether Gus was anything like himself, he said: “Yeah, definitely … he’s mouthy, he’s opinionated, he talks about stuff he doesn’t really know about or care about. It’s all these bloke traits.” But if Gervais is trying to lift the lid on whatever is going on beneath the obnoxious bravado, it is overshadowed by all the nastiness.
Protected by the ridiculousness of a cartoon cat, Gervais could have changed the narrative on his “old man yells at cloud” act – instead, Alley Cats is the same old provocative rubbish that arrives not with a roar, but a meow.
‘Alley Cats’ is streaming on Netflix
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