15 Storeys High – Nostalgia Central

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Vince is a miserable misanthropic, gormless bloke with no sense of embarrassment and no social graces. He has a fierce aversion to being touched and seems determined to lead a maudlin, forlorn existence.

He also seems to have no capacity for original thought, recycling stories he’s been told and claiming they happened to him (often repeating them back to the people who originally told them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they know he’s lying).

Vince works as a lifeguard at the local swimming baths and lives in a characterless 15-storey tower block in south London.

To help with funds, he has a flat-mate, Errol, a naive but optimistic man of Chinese extraction, hailing from a huge, mixed northern family. Living with Vince is no picnic, but Errol somehow makes a fist of it.

Vince’s singular adventures are also interspersed, for the viewer, with glimpses into the equally idiosyncratic lives of other people living in the tower block.

A grim realism was aided by the location shooting on the Brandon Estate in Kennington, south London.

An introverted, understated show with flashes of real and original wit beneath its deliberately grimy exterior, 15 Storeys High began as a radio comedy, and most of the TV episodes originated on the radio show.

The innovative and funny series – originally broadcast on the digital channel BBC Choice, later rebranded as BBC Three – suffered from poor scheduling and was not promoted to a mainstream terrestrial channel with a larger prime-time audience.

The hard work of making the series, followed by inept programming management, left Lock disillusioned with the experience and steered his TV career toward appearances on panel shows.

Sean Lock died of lung cancer on 16 August 2021. He was just 58.

Vince
Sean Lock
Errol
Benedict Wong
Darren
Dan Mersh

Episodes

The Sofa | The Model | Blue Rat | Ice Queen | Pool Kids | Dead Swan || Vince the Shirker | Car Boot and Pigeon Shit | The Holiday | The Plough | The Baby | Errol’s Women