Video: Toby Stephens talks of his comedy role

He is renowned for playing brooding heartthrobs on screen and giving heavyweight performances on stage. But now Toby Stephens has turned to comedy as a maverick detective with a complicated love life in the BBC Two programme Vexed. He told the BBC why this was his first on-screen comedic role.

Casting Vexed

If you have a great script then the first thing you can do as a director to f**k it up is cast it badly. So here I was with a script where the two central characters are, at least in part (and in no particular order): dysfunctional, neurotic, sexist, quarrelsome, self righteous and paranoid.

"I'm trying to build a rapport here!" barks Jack (Toby Stephens) at Kate (Lucy Punch) in comedy-drama Vexed. Well let me tell you now, Jack, it's never going to happen.

Stephens and Punch play mismatched police detectives and for the whole of the first episode there wasn't any discernible chemistry, sexual or comic, between them. They drive around a lot, swapping snappy dialogue and engaging in frisson-packed narky exchanges, but for all the good it does their on-screen relationship they may as well have shouted it out of the car window.

It is never helpful to apportion blame, but it's Toby Stephens' fault. He just hasn't the lightness of touch to do this sort of comedy. His character, clearly intended as a cynical, manipulative but loveable charmer, comes over as an unpleasant oaf, pure and simple.

Lucy Punch, however, is as good as Stephens is bad. She makes Kate likeable, vulnerable, funny and very sexy. But even the sharpest flint can't spark off wet wood.

Vexed: Crime doesn't pay

Crikey, Vexed is bad, though I can't say I was expecting very much.

TV review: Vexed

Puerile, silly and shameless - a few people might be vexed by Vexed. But I loved it.

Vexed, BBC Two, review

Scene: a cosy flat. On the floor is the corpse of a young woman. A female detective is already on the scene. Her male colleague arrives.

Female detective: "There's a big ginger cat somewhere. [Male detective giggles.] Did I say something funny?"

Male detective: "Sorry. [He laughs again.] It's nothing!"

Female detective: "Well, you're laughing at something! What is it?"

Male detective: "It's just that when you said 'big ginger', I thought you were gonna say 'pussy'! [Snorts deliriously.] Ginger hair, ginger cat... ginger pussy! [Guffaws at length.]"

That scene was from episode one of the new detective series Vexed (last night, BBC Two). Like many of the other scenes in this putative comedy drama, it left me pondering a deep and troubling question. Namely, am I losing my mind?

Well, it's all very well having these brilliant detectives, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and the CSI boffins, all going round smugly knowing everything and solving stuff. Obviously, if you were actually to be the victim of a crime, that's who you'd want investigating, or at the very least diligent, efficient plodders like the police in Taggart. But what about the rest of them, the rubbish cops who don't always get their man and don't have genius-level insights merely by looking at a few stray hairs or a misplaced receipt - aren't they being a bit discriminated against by TV?

Well, that gap is somewhat filled this week with a new comedy drama, Vexed, which boasts a crime-solving duo who won't bamboozle anyone with the cleverness of their deductions. A sort of cross between Moonlighting - the classic 1980s fantasy with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd - and Jasper Carrot's spoof The Detectives, Vexed is a rather entertaining twist on the over-done crime genre.

It stars Toby Stephens and Lucy Punch - no, you'll recognise her, she's been in heaps of low-key British programmes including the more traditional detecting of Poirot and Midsomer Murders, but this is her biggest role so far as Lucy. But it's Stephens who is the revelation, taking a break from playing posh cads to revel in the role of Jack, who thinks he is a smooth charmer and great cop... when in fact, he's so useless he can't remember the names of anyone involved in the investigation (at one point he wonders if the victim was 'Andrew Ridgely' only to be informed that he's thinking of Wham!) and is prone to falling off his chair in the middle of interrogations.

Stephens' performance is great fun and a refreshing change from know-it-all detectives; Jack knows nothing, but is convinced that his instincts are right. "We're police officers," he drawls, "the law doesn't apply to us." Punch's role is to keep him in line and restrain her partner's more outrageous antics but, thankfully, she does get to be funny too.

The plot of this first episode is appropriately silly - about murders linked to a supermarket loyalty card scheme database, which distracts Lucy and Jack into using the info on it to sneak on what her ex and his potential partners are buying. And the comedy elements work better than the drama: it's hard to get really concerned about a dangerous situation when you know that there are not going to be any serious ramifications. So I'm not sure how long the series can sustain its freshness but it's a nice alternative for now.

Vexed review

I had high hopes for this comedy-drama about two mismatched private eyes, mainly because it comes from writer Howard Overman, whose work on E4's Misfits turned a seemingly trivial delinquent riff on Heroes into a BAFTA-winning hit. I was hoping some of that magic would rub off on the less fantastical concerns of a lighthearted detective series. Sadly, while Vexed did have its moments, it was more miss than hit...

Peppered with old jokes and a creaky soundtrack, it's a satire on 1980s sleuthing that plays its cards close to its chest, throwing in random old pop culture references in the middle of tasteless corpse-hopping. It may be giving it too much credit but it's deliberately rubbish, although not in a 'crikey aren't we clever at being rubbish?' kind of way.

Toby Stephens veers oddly over the top as DI Jack Armstrong, a character who could have wandered in from the first series of Life On Mars, but his partnership with Lucy Punch hit my wacky offbeat charm button. And what's not to love about a show where the kitten is called Keith?

Transposing the Lethal Weapon template to suburban west London, the rather too knowing Vexed teams Toby Stephens and Lucy Punch as mismatched, bickering detectives. The pace, be warned, is frantic to the point of being exhausting as writer Howard Overman takes the scattergun approach to gags and quips. Get past this, though, and Vexed is actually quite promising, largely because it works so hard to come up with original scenarios. The opener deals with murders related to a supermarket loyalty scheme.