We Are Not Alone Review: Ghosts’ Naughtier, More Grown-Up Sibling

If you thought We Are Not Alone was going to be the kind of comforting comedy you get from Ghosts (it’s written by two of Ghosts’ creators, Ben Willbond and Laurence Rickard) you’ll quickly find out you’re wrong. The opening scene, in which the main character Stewart (Declan Baxter, Flatmates) ends up suddenly covered in his best friend’s innards after he gets crushed by an alien messaging device, is a pretty big clue that this is a departure into a slightly more grown-up territory.

This new feature-length Dave comedy doesn’t waste any time: we’re straight into the action, discovering Earth has been invaded and conquered by the Gu’uns, a blue, large-foreheaded alien race with Very Big Guns. The Gu’uns don’t muck about – their takeover has included blowing up New Zealand, nixing everyone’s mobile phone signal and blasting the Chancellor of England into space (so it’s not all bad news), and in a brief appearance from comedian Miles Jupp as a familiarly bumbling, posh Prime Minister we learn Great Britain is now called Territory 78.

Then we meet the aliens and discover they are, of course, hilariously human. The duo put in charge of England – a wickedly funny double act of Getting On’s Vicki Pepperdine as ‘good cop’ Trater and Man Down’s Mike Wozniak as ‘bad cop’ Gordan – are typically incompetent leaders, assisted by the wonderfully nice-but-dim, almost feral Greggs, a show-stealingly glorious performance by The Inbetweeners’ Joe Thomas. Willbond and Rickard also take excellent supporting roles as hapless guards. The Gu’uns enlist the help of Stewart to help get the humans on side, much to the humans’ instant disgust, putting him smack bang in the middle of the action.

Willbond and Rickard appeared to have approached writing We Are Not Alone with a crucial question at the front of their minds: how would an outsider react to all the utterly batshit things we humans have come to accept as normal? The Gu’un’s problem, as we soon discover, is they just don’t appreciate humanity’s capability to be monumentally stupid. They’ve spent decades searching for a planet with a breathable atmosphere after their own was swallowed by their sun, so are baffled when they discover cars – ‘your favourite mode of transport literally pumps out poison’ – they’re gleefully amused by our obsession with ‘colourful paper’ (money), and when Trater discovers where milk is from she politely requests a coffee ‘without anything issued from the teat of a living mammal.’