The Wrong Mans series 2 in the works, confirms Baynton

BBC Two's The Wrong Mans is gearing up for a second series. Co-creator and star Mathew Baynton confirmed to Digital Spy that he and James Corden have started work on new episodes.

With Blandings principally consisting of posh people strolling about being aristocratically bonkers, these adaptations of PG Wodehouse are like watching an episode of Downton where everyone has been on the gin all night. Which actually makes it rather more entertaining.

Helped no end by guest casting that included Mathew Baynton (The Wrong Mans) and Geoffrey McGivern (This Is Jinsy), the story of Throwing Eggs pretty much began and ended with the title. But it worked a treat.

Radio Times review

Gavin & Stacey co-creator James Corden returned to narrative comedy, flanked by one of the breakout stars of the year, Mathew Baynton. The Wrong Mans wasn't a sitcom but a full-on comedy thriller, in which Corden and Baynton played humble losers wrapped up in a criminal/espionage conspiracy. Breathless plotting and Hollywood-standard direction played off against the classic British scenario of bumblers struggling in extreme circumstances. It would have been easy for the comedy to make the action look silly, but The Wrong Mans was too smartly made for that.

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We were hardly going to go from Horrible Histories to an office sitcom, says star and writer of Sky1's new comedy Mathew Baynton

The final part of Mathew Baynton and James Corden's action-movie-spoof-com begins with the fugitive pair backed into a corner, an unlikely Hollywood plot device their only hope of escape. But escape they do, just as they grasp that the (not entirely intelligible) plot they're caught up in is linked to Berkshire Country Council, the boys' hitherto dullsville workplace. The friction between comedy and thriller has produced sparks of brilliance in this series, mainly in the magnificent incongruity of Corden's lovable loser Phil.

Our accidental all-action spy heroes Sam and Phil leap into some high-octane Bond-age scrapes tonight as, all too soon, we reach the end of the road for this excellent dramatic comedy.

It's been a deft mesh of the familiar concerns of everyday life with the preposterously epic, played with utter conviction by James Corden and Mathew Baynton.

But before the punchy final showdown, the pair have to get themselves out of their tricky Thelma & Louise-style cliffhanger...

Have you been watching ... The Wrong Mans?

Will James Corden and Mathew Baynton survive their wickedly funny crime caper involving Russian gangsters, MI5 and the Berkshire town planning office?

Today's fan poll: if you had to choose between James Corden and Mathew Baynton being mistaken for a rent boy and forced to perform a boy dance for the pleasure of drunken Russian gangsters, who would you plump for?

Right answer. It was Baynton's Sam, the little of this little and large combo, who lost a last remaining shred of dignity as The Wrong Mans (BBC Two) cranked up the thrilling element of its comedy-thriller plot.

It was just one memorable moment in an episode that also involved Corden getting mugged by an airbag. Visual comedy doesn't often do it for me but The Wrong Mans gets it spot on.

Described memorably as 'a scrawny hobbit and a male Clare Balding' - now you come to mention it - Baynton and Corden have fast developed into a winning double act, the latter resisting the temptation and letting Baynton's befuddled straight man set the tone. Thus far, The Wrong Mans is getting it totally right.

Mid-year review: The Wrong Mans

I didn't expect to be enjoying The Wrong Mans as much as I am, but it's doing something incredibly well: the thriller aspect is effective, while the humour is present without overshadowing the drama. It's a very difficult balance to get right, but writers James Corden and Mathew Baynton have managed it.