Should have stayed on radio

miss_lady_ice-853-608700

Close your eyes and you can imagine that this could possibly be conceived as funny on the radio. Radio comedy thrives off stereotypes- take for example the brilliant Cabin Pressure: smooth mature man, bumbling son, haranguing older woman and lovable loser. All clearly distinctive characters and all terribly funny.

However, the style is too broad for TV and I can imagine that even the genius Cabin Pressure would suffer there. Steve Delaney's ridiculously broad acting simply doesn't work. I'm not a particular fan of Miranda but it just about works in that all the characters are a little broad. It also doesn't help that the character is meant to be perceived as unfunny by everyone. Of course, this is all part of the joke but it's hard to make unfunny things funny.

Count Arthur Strong is a very gentle sitcom. Old Aunt Edna will not be offended in the slightest. I don't mind that there's an antidote to the ubiquitous swearing that passes for comedy nowadays, but it's all just a bit strained. It clearly wants to be like The Two Ronnies and other seventies sitcoms but the style just doesn't work in the modern day. If we wanted seventies-style comedies, we'd watch comedies from the seventies. The best comedy is based on truth- even if it's a surreal comedy. Count Arthur Strong does manage to scrape some credibility back, such as the ending of episode 5, which actually had a nice amount of pathos. It's these moments of pathos that make you hope that what is intended to pass for comedy will finally become comic.

As for the other characters, this is very much the Count Arthur show, despite the show being when he is not there. Rory Kinnear is excellent as biographer Michael, the disappointing son of a successful comedian, but the other characters are even thinner than cardboard cutouts.

Hopefully it will turn itself around with the last episode but I doubt it. Despite the name, Count Arthur Strong is rather weak.

score 3/10

miss_lady_ice-853-608700 6 August 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2846141/