Anthony Head

Talent agents Alex and Helen start this new sitcom having sex. But all is not well - Helen is getting over tyhe death of her fiance and scruffbag Alex's pursuit of her becomes more desperate as she pleads that he get over his divorce first. Episode one shows huge promise; Mangan is a likeable foil to Helen's cynical world view, there's some great knoc-em-dead visual gags and Chris Neil's punchy script drives things along with unflinching honesty. Plus, there's the ever marvellous Anthony Head playing the highly sexed agency boss.

Free Agents is a new romantic comedy series, wallowing in obscenity, about a dysfunctional couple failing to have an affair. Personally I enjoyed it a lot, although I probably wouldn't recommend it to my 84-year-old mother. The couple concerned are a divorced father-of-two (Stephen Mangan) and a work colleague (Sharon Horgan) whose fiancé dropped dead at the age of 34.

The Mangan character is broke, homeless and about as sexually sophisticated as a 15-year-old born-again Christian, while his nongirlfriend is suffering from posttraumatic death disorder. They work together in an actors agency run by a cynical old goat (Anthony Head), out of whose mouth pours a stream of uncensored filth. It works because, deep beneath the brittle layer of self-conscious trendiness, it is an old-fashioned love story with its own perverse brand of charm.

Free spirit for new comedy

In a modern office building towering above Euston station, Stephen Mangan, Anthony Head and Sharon Horgan have been hard at work on a new Channel 4 comedy.

Feature: Free Agents

As if today's celebrities weren't rude enough, here's a sitcom about their even ruder agents. The Telegraph visits the set of Channel 4's new comedy series Free Agents and meets cast members Sharon Horgan, Stephen Mangan and Anthony Head.

Oh deep, deep joy. Mark Evans's comic homage to Dickens and 19th-century literature is back for a second volume as Sir Philip Bin, inventor of, er, the bin, continues to look back on a life that has been an endless progression of trials, setbacks, and conveniently placed cliffhanger endings, where adventure has followed him like a dog follows a man with bacon trousers and lamb-chop underpants.

His evil nemesis, Mr Gently Benevolent, dead at the end of the first series, is resurrected, à la Mary Shelley, to exact vengeance on his ward and his friends. There's no point trying to follow the plot, it would be like trying to explain a Monty Python sketch to someone with a humour bypass. Enjoy spotting the references, the rich language and the great rolling vowels from Richard Johnson as Sir Pip and some great ham carved by Anthony Head as the villain of the piece.

Last August a six-part comedy series began on Radio 4 that captivated most of those who heard it - and the people who didn't like it were just plain wrong. Written by Mark Evans, Bleak Expectations was a wonderful pastiche of Dickens - the two novels cannibalised for the programme title for a start - as well as other Victorian costume dramas, spiced with surrealistic devices such as underwater squirrels and a raft made up of trained tuna. Evans worked on the admirable principle of throwing so many jokes at the listener that even if they missed, some most would get through and, at times, listening to it was exhausting.

And now it's back. One doesn't want to spoil the tension by detailing any aspect of the plot but those who feared that we had seen the last of Gently Benevolent because Anthony Head, who played him, had more glamorous parts to play on TV need fear no longer. Richard Johnson again plays the elderly Sir Philip Bin, and Tom Allen his younger, accident and grief-prone self, while Geoffrey Whitehead plays all six members of the sinister Sternbeater family.

Chapter Three, incidentally, even has a guest star - David Mitchell. When the greats of modern comedy queue up to take part in your show in any capacity, however small, you know you're up there with The Muppets and Extras.

'I am the best safe-cracker this country has ever produced!' hisses Maurice Riley (Anthony Head) as he fiddles his way through a phalanx of whirring mechanical wotsits. Such an assertion would be worrying at the best of times, but the fact that it's uttered by a man in a pink satin blindfold suggests that this is not a character to be trifled with. And he's not.

In the first episode of this curious new comedy drama we join the putatively reformed criminal and his hapless chum Syd (Warren Clarke) as they relocate from the Costa del Larceny to a dinky village in Devon. The resulting romp has some flashes of sweetness - not least the wonderful Dean Lennox Kelly as a crafty publican - but so cantankerous is Maurice, and so daft are his scrapes, that you may find it difficult to care.

Telegraph Article

Anthony Head, Warren Clarke and Jenny Agutter talk to The Telegraph about the worst crimes they've ever committed.

If any theme has emerged from this range of Comedy Showcases, it has been to see how far the boundaries of taste can be pushed. Here, Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan play theatrical agents who have been bruised by past relationships and are now having an unsatisfactory nonaffair driven by his need to sleep on her sofa. He is traumatised with guilt for abandoning his children and she feels responsible for the death of her fiancé. Both are needy, only their needs are different. There is a good deal of snappy banter between the two, but Anthony Head as their boss steals the show as a pervy old goat out of whose mouth pours an unending stream of uncensored filth. It's like being confronted by an erection on screen - more amazing than shocking.

There's little funnier than other people's emotional damage and the consequent mess they make of things, so Chris Niel's tale of two colleagues - he an estranged dad, she lately availed of a dead fiance - who have casual sex and have to deal with the aftermath is very funny indeed. Sharon Horgan (Pulling and Angelo's) and Green Wing's Stephen Mangan star as the pair, with Anthony Head their coke-snorting, sex-crazed boss ("You've been bashing some gash, haven't you?"). Who knew Rupert Giles from Buffy could be so foul-mouthed? To think he kissed Joyce Summers with that mouth.