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.
