James Corden

The Wrong Mans series 2 in the works, confirms Baynton

BBC Two's The Wrong Mans is gearing up for a second series. Co-creator and star Mathew Baynton confirmed to Digital Spy that he and James Corden have started work on new episodes.

Radio Times review

Will James Corden ever live down the moment he was forced to cut Adele off mid-acceptance speech during the Brit Awards in 2012? And, with Corden's last appearance as host of the music extravaganza just days away, will Jonathan Ross be able to refrain from mentioning it?

We'll find out tonight as the star of The Wrong Mans and Gavin & Stacey takes his turn to be interviewed, along with the perennially glamorous actress Uma Thurman and Strictly Come Dancing winner Abbey Clancey.

It's the night when TV's big guns mount a barrage of merriment to blast us over the finishing line of 2013. Point your remote pretty much anywhere and a party mood is guaranteed - without the need for an actual party. On Channel 4 Alan Carr gets help from James Corden, Abbey Clancy and Tinie Tempah. There really is no excuse for letting the fizz in your glass go flat.

Radio Times review

Gavin & Stacey co-creator James Corden returned to narrative comedy, flanked by one of the breakout stars of the year, Mathew Baynton. The Wrong Mans wasn't a sitcom but a full-on comedy thriller, in which Corden and Baynton played humble losers wrapped up in a criminal/espionage conspiracy. Breathless plotting and Hollywood-standard direction played off against the classic British scenario of bumblers struggling in extreme circumstances. It would have been easy for the comedy to make the action look silly, but The Wrong Mans was too smartly made for that.

James Corden confirmed as 2014 Brit award hosts

James Corden has been confirmed as host of the 2014 Brit Awards - but it will be his last event as presenter.

The final part of Mathew Baynton and James Corden's action-movie-spoof-com begins with the fugitive pair backed into a corner, an unlikely Hollywood plot device their only hope of escape. But escape they do, just as they grasp that the (not entirely intelligible) plot they're caught up in is linked to Berkshire Country Council, the boys' hitherto dullsville workplace. The friction between comedy and thriller has produced sparks of brilliance in this series, mainly in the magnificent incongruity of Corden's lovable loser Phil.

Our accidental all-action spy heroes Sam and Phil leap into some high-octane Bond-age scrapes tonight as, all too soon, we reach the end of the road for this excellent dramatic comedy.

It's been a deft mesh of the familiar concerns of everyday life with the preposterously epic, played with utter conviction by James Corden and Mathew Baynton.

But before the punchy final showdown, the pair have to get themselves out of their tricky Thelma & Louise-style cliffhanger...

Congratulations to James Corden and Mat Baynton for inventing a whole new TV genre, the thriller-com.

At the end of last week's episode their hapless duo Sam and Phil were surrounded by heavily armed MI6 agents on the ground and in the air.

Their escape looked impossible - and after tonight's opening you might still not be convinced as to how they manage to elude capture for another half-hour.

No matter. The concluding triumph tonight has so much intense physical comedy it could be a workout video.

The final episode of Mat Baynton and James Corden's irresistible comedy thriller doesn't deliver what you hope it will. It goes much further than that. There's payoff after air-punching pay-off as the various threads of the story swiftly come together, with the sort of swagger you can't get away with unless you've been solidly entertaining for the previous five episodes.

But the increasingly heroic stooges Sam and Phil have been: chasing every red herring and unlikely plot twist just as we have, with their everyman meekness and uncertain friendship constantly threatening to spoil their efforts to do the right thing against the odds. As we rejoin the action, they merely have to escape from a circle of gun-toting special agents, before exposing a huge political conspiracy they can't prove exists. You wouldn't bet against them.