Terry Mynott interview

Terry Mynott tells us what we can expect from Series 2 of The Mimic.

A downbeat sitcom that plays out like a low-key indie film: the talented Terry Mynott is the gloriously named Martin Hurdle, an extremely lowly site maintenance worker at a pharmaceuticals firm who has very few friends or prospects, and a talent for celebrity impressions that forms his mental escape route. He may also have a long-lost son. Mynott was in The Morgana Show and VIP, where he worked with The Mimic writer Matt Morgan - but where those shows were brash and crass, this is the opposite.

Martin Hurdle continues to hide in plain sight in this week's second episode of the comedy drama, his vocal abilities employed to seduce a swimsuit model over the phone (as Christopher Walken), to socialise with strangers in a pub (as an Irishman) and to amuse his long-lost son (as Ian McKellen), whose mother he re-encounters tonight. Who the real Martin is, however, remains an engrossing mystery: unless his entire personality can be constructed from life's little disappointments, setbacks and missed opportunities.

The laughs come mostly from Terry Mynott's spot-on impressions or his deadbeat pal, Neil (Neil Maskell), who's considering dating someone he met online who has a chocolate lab, ('Some kind of Willy Wonka shit'). It's another beautifully judged blend of humour and pathos: one false step and it could be either dismal farce or Taxi Driver-esque alienation horror. No danger of either just yet, though: in Martin, Terry Mynott has created a tragicomic character it's impossible not to root for.

There's a lot that's very, very good about The Mimic, which stars the gifted impressionist Terry Mynott as lowly maintenance man Martin Hurdle.

It's the second episode tonight, but if you missed the first all you need to know is that Martin escapes his humdrum life by doing other people's voices - everyone from Alan Carr to Christopher Walken - and last week he discovered he has an 18-year-old son called Steven. Probably. We're still waiting for the results of the DNA test.

As a means of doing something more interesting with impressions than just going down the Dead Ringers route (or Very Important People, which was Mynott's last gig) this gets full marks for originality.

And the excellent supporting cast includes Ami Metcalf (last seen playing the young Kathy Burke in Walking And Talking) who plays colleague Chelsea, and Neil Maskell (fresh from playing Utopia's hit man) as a depressed newsagent whose foray into internet dating tonight is inspired.

But the mixture of occasionally crude humour and misty-eyed pathos is a tough one to pull off successfully. And that soundtrack is one dollop of syrup too far.

Radio Times review

When I saw the premise for Channel 4's new comedy The Mimic, I was furious. It might banjax my long-nurtured plan to write a sitcom for Alistair McGowan, in which he plays a TV impressionist whose personal life is a disaster because of his inability to converse as himself. Scene one: Alistair resolutely embarks on his sixth marriage, but recites the vows in the voices of Peter Snow, Jim Bowen, and Orville. Later, the wedding night is ruined when Alistair does Dot Cotton in his new wife's ear.

Anyway, as it turns out The Mimic is sort of the opposite of that. Terry Mynott is the fabulously named Martin Hurdle, a gentle loser who has only one friend, a dowdy trouper called Jean (Jo Hartley), and no future prospects in his work maintaining the grounds of a faceless pharmaceutical firm. His secret, and his mental release valve, is that he's a brilliant impressionist.

The Mimic is by Russell Brand's old sidekick Matt Morgan, who worked with Mynott on The Morgana Show and VIP. Where they were crass and brash, this is slow, quiet and lovely. It has the vibe of an indie film, possibly one starring a big comedy name gambling their fame to prove they're human and can act.

Mynott has no fame to risk, yet there's still bravery in the way he makes Martin so uninhibitedly genuine and sad. In the first episode he was often filmed to accentuate his isolation. His little triumphs mostly weren't witnessed by anyone. He stopped doing his spot-on Alan Carr in the company car park when people walked into earshot, and his fantastic imagined conversation between Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones faltered when Jean asked who he was talking to and told him to get some sleep.

The Mimic[c/] is a bit more than a sitcom. You wonder not only whether it will still be funny next week and the week after, but also where it will go - what will happen to the hero. Is he a talented man waiting to be discovered or just a lonely man waiting to be loved?

Scenes where Martin met his previously unknown 18-year-old son, and where he took revenge on a bad HR manager by being him on the office tannoy, hinted that his achingly small world is about to expand. We'll be rooting for him to survive the change.

TV commissioners take note. Impressions aren't funny. The actual act of sounding like someone else is an impressive skill, especially if you can do more than one, but by themselves, impressions are not in the remotest bit amusing. Jon Culshaw may do a canny Tom Baker, but the mere act of sounding like Tom Baker is about as humorous as getting stuck in a lift. With Jon Culshaw.

So it was refreshing to see Terry Mynott bringing something very different to the TV impressions table in his rather bleak new sitcom The Mimic.

Dour, slow and not the cheeriest of concepts, The Mimic doesn't scream hit. The tale of maintenance man Martin Hurdle, who muddles through life with only his uncanny ability as a mimic to perk himself up, isn't a gag-fest. It ekes out jokes and woos you in with pathos and the likeable Mynott.

It wasn't the most sure-footed debut, but purely for bravery and trying something different, I'm willing to come back next week. Mynott could knock out 27 minutes of Terry Wogan and Ronnie Corbett impressions, but he's tested new waters here and his exploration of the mundane, outsiders and the ordinary showed brief glimmers of potential.

And the fact that he didn't just wheel out a Tom Baker impression means that I'm willing to give those glimmers a chance.

Partial though I'm not to the word "quirky", Channel 4's new midweek sitcom, The Mimic, made a special plea for it, perhaps along with "gentle" and also, at times, "funny". Here was Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott), a man with a dull job amusing himself by doing impressions. Wogan and Ronnie Corbett have become too standardised to impress but you had to laugh at his Al Pacino and his James Earl Jones quibbling with Morgan Freeman. The show didn't entirely depend on mimicry and there was strong support from Jo Hartley as his live-in friend Jean and Neil Maskell (arch psychopath from Utopia) turned up as a compellingly neurotic newsagent.

The first episode found an anxious Martin meeting up with an old flame's 18-year-old son for a burger followed by a DNA test. "If I'm not your dad, we can still be friends," he said. It was droll but unexpectedly touching. When it came back positive, I almost had to stop eating my biscuit.

The Mimic, Channel 4, review

The Mimic (Channel 4) is a new sitcom with Terry Mynott playing a dull man, Martin Hurdle, a lowly maintenance operative who is also a brilliant impressionist. Terry Mynott is good at both halves. His dullness is like Julian Barratt's in The Mighty Boosh: understated and unattractive. He smiles like the horse in Picasso's Guernica.

The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.

Martin Hurdle - even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical company. There is no hope of promotion from whitewashing graffiti off walls, so he disappears into a multi-coloured vocal hinterland where he can be any number of camp television presenters or, in the sharpest sequence, James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman engaging in a Socratic squabble over who has the better Afro-American larynx for narrating documentaries about penguins.

This ability has not brought Martin any more joy away from work. He lives with Jean (Jo Hartley), a female flatmate who is equally propping up the bar at midlife's last-chance saloon. For all the richness of Martin's interior life set against his humdrum routine, The Mimic could easily struggle to escape its binary parameters, but this first episode swiftly introduced a second outlandish scenario: Martin has discovered that he may have fathered a child 18 years earlier. It's all subject to a DNA test, but when they meet in a pub, the boy is soon crossing his fingers that they won't be related after all. This is a worry Martin articulates to himself through the conduit of Wedding Crashers. "If I didn't know who this guy was, and it turned out to be this guy," says Vince Vaughn, " I would be pretty disappointed." Or was it Owen Wilson?

It'll be worth finding out where The Mimic, already promisingly weird, goes from here. A lot rests on how series creator Matt Morgan marries two distinctly left-field scenarios - incurable impersonator discovers he's sired an adult. It certainly revinvents a branch of entertainment that has felt for a while like a busted flush.