Count Arthur Strong episode 1 review

There's a very warm and cosy feeling to Count Arthur Strong. Watching it is like seeing a friend you've never met.

Rory Kinnear interview

Despite the hype, Rory Kinnear will not be the new Time Lord. But with starring roles in BBC comedy Count Arthur Strong and an unmissable new Channel 4 drama, his TV future looks bright.

Count Arthur Strong - TV review

Following Count Arthur Strong's move from radio comedy slot to television, he needs to up his game - and his gag quotient - pretty damn quickly.

TV review: Count Arthur Strong

First episodes of sitcoms are, notoriously, the most difficult, and Count Arthur Strong got a great deal right, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments crammed into its 28 minutes. This could well become the next comedy smash the BBC so desperately needs... expect an eventual leap to BBC One.

The trailers for Count Arthur Strong made it appear as funny as John Inverdale's objectionable analysis of Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli. However, appearances can be deceptive.

Though it's saddled with an awful laughter track, the button lent on at random intervals, Count Arthur Strong - the character and the sitcom - is hewn from the great British tradition of eccentricity. It's not bending over backwards to appear wacky, it's genuinely strange.

This means parts are very funny while other moments - to borrow the catchphrase of angry cafe owner Bulent, the pick of the supporting cast - are 'what the flip?' But there were three or four laugh-out-loud moments in its opening episode, a rare thing for a British sitcom.

Count Arthur Strong is played by co-writer/creator Steve Delaney, who delivers every line as if he's about to embark on a bombing mission on the toilet - he keeps a gong to disguise the noise.

Strong is a former comedian, now languishing in obscurity, whose life is filled with oddballs and even odder lines of thought. Into his life stumbles Michael, the son of his ex-comedy partner, researching a book about his dead and not much loved dad. And that's about it for set-up.

It's the interplay between the bravura Delaney and Rory Kinnear, neatly underplaying Michael, that keeps Count Arthur Strong on track when too much weirdness threatens to derail it. There are tumbleweed moments but, with Graham 'Father Ted' Linehan on co-writing duty, there's comedy gold too.

One exchange, when Arthur summed up Michael's life thus: 'And you went on to write books about anal museums,' sweetly struck the comedy spot. Add to that Michael ranting about plurals not needing apostrophes - yay, go Michael - and what you've got is a peculiar treat that lurches from hit to miss and back with peculiar abandon. Give it a go.

Good radio comedy could not have sounded less funny on television, nor canned laughter more ironic. Something was surely lost in translation in the BBC's transposition of the Sony Radio Academy-award-winning show Count Arthur Strong into prime-time TV.

Did anyone muster a laugh when Steve Delaney's doddery old former variety star, Arthur Strong, opened his front door and said to hapless young Michael (Rory Kinnear): "You rang the bell. I've broken a plate because of you. That was dishwasher safe, that was"? Cue canned laughter. Or when he asked what Michael did for a living: "I'm an author," replied Michael, to which Arthur puzzled: "I thought your name was Michael... I'm Arthur." Cue more canned laughter. Also cue head-scratching from those at home who had a soft spot for the radio show's silly yet lovable humour, but failed to see the charm of these dull-witted scenes, attempting to pass for OAP slapstick.

It is sad - and perplexing - that it didn't work, given that it is written by Delaney and Father Ted creator Graham Linehan. Delaney originally created the character in the 1980s, resurrecting him for the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997 to much acclaim, and after that, for radio since 2004. Astonishingly, given its success in these other mediums, the most recent incarnation as a TV sitcom refused to spark into life: the greasy caff was filled with a man wearing a sandwich board, an old dear from Poland and some others who looked like extras from Last of the Summer Wine, while an angry café manager said "What the flip?" a lot at these old people's dribbling stupidities. The likeable Kinnear, playing the uptight son of Strong's ex-variety partner, went some way to redeem the whole thing with his straight-man act as a tormented soul.

Visually, it was so derivative that it seemed deliberate, as if the nostalgia of flock wallpaper, long-fringed lamps, and Strong's pencilled-on Hitler moustache could pass for good, funny entertaining. That said, Strong is too much of a radio institution to be condemned to the TV rubbish heap. Perhaps this opening episode just suffered a severe case of first-night nerves.

Review: Count Arthur Strong, BBC Two

Steve Delaney and Graham Linehan neatly set up the story, although the thing I loved about the radio show - Count Arthur's pomposity and irritation with life, in which an hilarious mix of malapropisms, Spoonerisms and downright idiocy would form a crescendo of confusion on his part - was noticeably absent here.

Count Arthur Strong review

As far as opening episodes go it ticked all the boxes, in that it was funny, introduced us to each of the characters and set up a comedy world you want to be part of and ultimately tune back into week after week. I totally got it, the characters, the dynamics, the way in which the episode was structured.

Count Arthur Strong draws fewer than 1m

New sitcom about ageing variety performer pulls in just just 971,000 viewers despite seven-series lead-in on Radio 4.

count Arthur Strong review

Count Arthur Strong wasn't terrible (we haven't got another The Wright Way on our hands here) but I didn't find it as funny as I was led to believe I would.