Brian Cox (I)

Jesse Armstrong to write HBO drama series Succession

Succession stars Brian Cox as Logan Roy, the tough, powerful, and aging patriarch of the Roy family and head of a family-controlled international media conglomerate. Jesse Armstrong will serve as showrunner, writer, and executive producer on the series.

Phill Jupitus to play Arthur Conan Doyle on stage

Phill Jupitus will portray the Edinburgh-born author opposite Alan Cox, the actor son of the Dundee-born star Brian Cox, at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Radio Times review

Frank and Dorothy are planning their wedding but pig-headed Bob is determined to be the centre of attention - that is if he doesn't stop their big day in the first place. Bob cannot envisage life without Frank, his best pal (and dogsbody) of 52 years standing, and when he hears the couple will move to Fife, he takes drastic action unbecoming of a best man.

Bob Servant is a gift role for Brian Cox, who manages to make Bob sympathetic no matter how deluded and bonkers he becomes. But the second run of Neil Forsyth's breezy Dundonian comedy comes to a halt after just three episodes. Let's hope for more soon.

Brian Cox blows like a salty hurricane through another episode of this garrulous sitcom. In a moment of madness, Bob lobs a bin bag full of frozen burgers on to the skull of a love rival and is charged with aggravated assault. His regular brief, Objection McNally, is drunk and trouserless, so Bob conducts his own defence, leading to a pleasingly retro courtroom farce in which our man bickers with the jury, calls the judge "Skipper" and asks his nearest and dearest to perjure themselves. He's a guilty pleasure.

Bob Servant, despite Brian Cox, and my having loved his first outing, isn't (yet) funny. Cox and Miller are deeply talented comedy actors, let down here by pilot scripts. I know that the writer of the second, Neil Forsyth, is capable of far greater nuanced stuff, and a fine pawky Dundonian sense of humour, than which there are few finer this side of Brooklyn, and can only hope that he and Cox haven't already alienated audiences. BBC Four prides itself on "experimental", but these should have been sure things. Wh'appen?

Radio Times review

In 2013, Brian Cox told me that filming series one had been such a joy and he'd be back like a shot from his Brooklyn home, were there a second run. "I come from that part of the world [Dundee]. It's humour that's not seen anywhere else. It's not Glaswegian. It's not dreichy. It's about light, air and eternal optimism." Writer Neil Forsyth was "a genuine original comic voice".

Bonkers Bob is back. Broughty Ferry's loudmouth has ditched local politics and is peddling huge, noxious burgers from a van. He's thrown off kilter by council official Megan (Daniela Nardini), who tries to shut him down, and by his buddy Frank, who suddenly has a racy sex life.

Four episodes in and this comedy about a deluded wannabe politician in the Scottish town of Broughty Ferry is still failing to live up to expectations. The books (and subsequent radio show) by Neil Forsyth have gained quite a following but this series is just not funny, despite the best efforts of Brian Cox in the title role. Tonight Servant, ahead of the by-election, messes up a television interview when answering a question about his political ambitions by saying he wants to be seen as Annie Lennox. His mother (Sheila Reid) doesn't help his cause by telling a journalist that her son has "a head full of mince".

Brian Cox has given life to a great new comic monster here, a man who blazes through life offending everyone in his path without ever losing his enormous self-belief. Neil Forsyth's comedy features the prize idiot previously known for his letter-writing in books and on Radio 4, who's now running chaotically for Parliament: Dundee cheeseburger magnate Bob Servant. Cox brilliant makes the most of an already very funny, bewilderingly silly script. "Phone the internet" and catch up with it...