Graham Linehan

Count Arthur Strong, a transfer of Steve Delany's infinitely long-running Radio 4 show to TV, takes the first few minutes of its first episode to break the audience in to what the show is going to be.

Opening with proper thesp and straight-man-in-chief Rory Kinnear, the show begins in single-camera glossiness, and slowly guides the viewer, via a hinting laugh track and an open door into the Count's multi-camera world.

Graham Linehan has joined Count Arthur creator and performer Delany as co-writer of the TV version of the show, and it's difficult not read this as a version The IT Crowd's opening scene, albeit with a much more pronounced tonal and visual shift.

In subsequent episodes, we open with a parpy theme tune and Arthur (Delany) and Michael (Kinnear) standing in front of a proscenium arch, which is about right for the old-school staginess of the piece.

You can see why Count Arthur Strong has been granted a second series already. The Graham Linehan factor. The evidently tight budget, smartly expended. And an edge that tends to be missing from pre-watershed sitcoms. It remains a slippery beast, at once anachronistic (Arthur's body induces nausea at a life-drawing class) and forward-thinking (Arthur is introduced to the internet, with disastrous results).

Steve Delaney's word-mangling, monologue-dispensing throwback might have struggled to sustain a TV sitcom alone, but stalwart support from Rory Kinnear (as Michael), among others, adds essential layers to the comedy. And a superbly sustained gag about Michael's inadvertent racism keeps the chuckles bubbling along, climaxing in a Jack the Ripper tour by ice-cream van that defies easy explanation by a humble TV reviewer. Odd, but undeniably likeable.

Graham Linehan's fingerprints are all over this new sitcom, which he and Steve Delaney have co-adapted from the latter's radio show. It's a little more offbeat than Father Ted and The IT Crowd, but the storylines, which seamlessly build to dizzying heights of ridiculousness, are just as winning. This week, Count Arthur and Michael (the son of Arthur's one-time comedy partner) end up on the run in an ice-cream van, dressed in Victorian costume, after fraudulently operating incredibly misleading Jack the Ripper tours.

I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the cricked neck and spilt Radox as, bath-bound, I crane my head towards the living room.

It wasn't bad. It was co-written by Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, which you would expect to have accorded it some comedy chops, and original creator Steve Delaney, who played the titular count, a pompous, bumbling malaprop-trap from Doncaster. The problem was this: it wasn't at all funny. There's recent history here, in the form of executives merely thinking a "name" is enough - in this case, Linehan; a couple of months ago, and in a far, far worse case of unfunny, Ben Elton - to create, as they probably say, albeit with knowing cynicism, comedy gold. In the end, it was just a something about a pompous bumbling man from Donny. Quite why it ever worked on radio I'm now struggling to understand.

Here's a thought. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one, but: few programmes migrate well from radio. There's Have I Got News For You, a spin-off from the (still extant, and wickeder than ever) News Quiz; and Tony Hancock's finest half-hours were actually on the screen. But executive shoes corridor-crunch on the ossified bodies of "hit" shows that died on the transition to screen. Just a Minute became just a dirge. Famously, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's... was a roiling trough of rhino poop. Not even that lovely Martin Freeman, in the marginally better movie, could pull it off, and the original TV series was a travesty. The phrase "Zaphod Beeblebrox had two heads" works fine-ish as a line in a book, or spoken on the radio (actually it wasn't that funny, ever) - when we can imagine it, in the bath, in the wonder of the mind's eye. On TV, some poor actor was actually given a kind of "ball of saggy painted calico, with eyes" to waggle on his shoulders as a second head. It's the difference between having to show it, and trusting the listener/reader to, basically, "insert image here": and, incidentally, the reason why Lucky Jim, the funniest book of the 20th century, has never been filmed, other than execrably. Surreality, wordplay and extended interior monologues would seem particularly vulnerable to becoming lost in transition: but I don't know quite why I'm banging on about things that don't work on TV, when there were so many last week that did. It's just that I... well, I quite liked lying in the bath. Imagining.

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.

A strong premise for this sitcom by Steve Delaney and Graham Linehan: Michael Baker, an author of rather dry books is commissioned to write a biography of his dead father, a famous comedian of the 1970s. Research duly leads Michael to his father's double act partner, Arthur Strong. Rory Kinnear is great as Michael Baker, but Arthur himself (Delaney) seems to be not so much a character as some cliches about elderly people, wearing a hat. What follows is mainly a procession of Last Of The Summer Wine-style "funny business".

Previously a minor cult on Radio 4, Count Arthur Strong makes the leap to the small screen courtesy of Graham Linehan (Father Ted). He has co-written the TV version with Steve Delaney, who plays the title role.

It's a bit of a self-consciously bonkers affair, Strong being the kind of over-the-top character who is the very definition of Marmite. Strong's speciality is mangling the English language until it screams for mercy - and you might be doing the same.

As far as I'm aware, just me, my friend Tim and RT's radio editor Jane Anderson are fans of Count Arthur Strong, comedian Steve Delaney's malapropism-prone creation, who's been comfortably berthed on Radio 4 for years. So it's good of Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to bring the Count to TV (as co-writer, with Delaney, and director) just for us.

Strong is an acquired taste, an exquisitely dreadful old fool, a hopeless former self-aggrandising variety show turn with delusions of greatness. He was always a divisive figure on Radio 4, so doubtless he'll split TV audiences, too. But give him a chance, parts of this are really funny. Who can resist nonsense like "She's choking, give her the Heineken manoeuvre!"

Lovely Rory Kinnear provides some sanity as the son of an old friend of the Count's, who's writing his dad's biography.

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