Review of Rosie Jones's new Channel 4 comedy

There’s a great idea at the core of Pushers: that disabled people are so invisible in society that they can pass through it undetected. And even when they are seen, it’s almost always as a victim needing sympathy. The perfect cover, then, for a gang of drug dealers.

Rosie Jones’s character Emily falls into this world when she has her benefits cut by a typically insensitive bureaucrat, and runs into old school friend and keen benefits cheat Ewan in the toilets. It’s soon apparent he has a sideline and recruits her for a delivery errand.

Emily is more Moz, Johnny Vegas’s hapless character in Ideal, than Breaking Bad’s Walter White and is especially prone to slapstick mishaps, causing more than one bag of cocaine to explode like a snowglobe. Nonetheless she takes to her new life with purpose, recruiting a band of misfits to her nefarious enterprise, eager to make it her ticket out of poverty, and a life in which she has little agency.

Episode one starts with a bang to hook you in, promising some high stakes that Emily’s encounters with benign police officers fail to deliver. But beyond that, the first couple of episodes are quite slow at setting everything up, with Jones and co-writer Peter Fellows meticulous about establishing every detail of the characters, premise and landscape when broader brushes would probably have sufficed to get things moving.

Though these oddballs are exaggerated, there’s a clear intention to depict the real world of neglected council estates, no-frills pubs and concrete jungle shopping centres – as well as the consequences of the dehumanising benefits system. This realism doesn’t always quite chime tonally with the broad physical gags and ridiculous comic personalities, although it will be these larger-than-life characters that will bring audiences back.  

As played by Ryan McParland, Ewan may be the able-bodied member of the crew but he has the feeblest mind, the classic sitcom dimwit and especially prone to malapropisms, a device that’s liberally used for a gag. The best of which has him confused by a carton of milk.

Another standout is Jon Furlong as the possibly psychotic Sean – though he is fully in control of when to turn on the terrifying outbursts – but all the group have their peculiarities ripe for comic picking. That each has a disability which brings something different to the dynamics of the group –  like a DWP version of the Avengers – is key. Emily, by comparison, is the sane one at the centre of it all, but both as cheeky and forthright as Jones herself.

The shallow social climber Jo (Rhiannon Clements) who runs as an obvious vanity project the charity where Emily volunteers is a weak point, a crude upper-middle-class caricature. But she’s so often away on some spa Retreat or other that she’s rarely seen.

Jones clearly wants to get in some satirical digs at how the system is rigged against disabled people, and has been adamant about the representation she wants to bring to the screen – and on both points, it’s job done. These comic oddballs are defined not by their disability, but by their personality flaws, just like any other sitcom characters. 

Will Pushers have you addicted? That probably depends if you’re prepared to invest a little time in getting past the relatively sluggish set-up and overlook some of the broader toilet humour, and instead wait for the characters to fall into their grooves.

• Pushers starts on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight – after Taskmaster – with a double bill.

Review date: 19 Jun 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett