Harry Worth

Radio Times review

Spirited buffoon Count Arthur Strong returns to wade through more malapropisms with his pals from the scruffy café. Arthur, a former actor long past his glory days, carries on like an actor playing himself in a film of his life. He's an acquired taste, a Radio 4 staple where he was adored and derided equally, and now a television presence, whose first series two years ago didn't trouble a mass audience.

This is all irrelevant, of course, if you find Arthur (created and played by Steve Delaney) a joyously funny poltroon very much in the vein of Harry Worth. As we return, Arthur's friend Michael (smashing Rory Kinnear) arrives after six months in Yorkshire, suffering from writer's block. And he finds that Arthur has written a "racist" novel, a "Fifty Crates of Plates for the over-70s".

Grandad (Yorkshire) by Mike Stott was a comedy with dashes of desolation. Frank Middlemass as Grandad and another scene-stealing performance from Trevor Peacock as a gloriously bumbling doctor, something along the lines of Harry Worth. By the way, where is Harry Worth?

Perhaps, too, Harry was not at his peak last night. He triumphed most surely when trampling a way through the form-filling jungle of English officialdom. But for me, his owlish incomprehension when plunged into some new catastrophe was so delightful that I watched with a big, silly grin permanently fixed on my face.

But in Harry the dialogue is secondary to the misunderstandings and chaos of the plot and the clumsy earnestness of its central character. And on this score Harry Worth showed again that he is one of our most endearing and amusing TV comedians.