Jo Hartley

Prevenge - review

Prevenge was screened in the 'laughs' comedy strand of the London Film Festival, but the humour in Alice Lowe's directorial debut most definitely of the jet-black tone. Its tone is bleak and unnerving, with only the occasional dry comic moment offering relief from the brutal actions of its serial-killing anti-heroine, Ruth.

Prevenge review

Alice Lowe's self-starring directorial debut finds a pregnant woman out for blood.

Jo Hartley interview

Jo Hartley explains why meditation has had a profound effect upon her life.

It may occupy the downbeat end of the spectrum, but when The Mimic flies it really soars and this is a particularly lovely episode.

Inspired by new girlfriend Harriet to push himself out of his rut, under-achieving impressionist Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott) signs up with a new agent.

Turns out this guy already has another impressionist on his books which results in a mimic-off between Martin and his competition (guest star John Thomson).

As for that new girlfriend, Martin's mate Jean (Jo Hartley) can't hide her jealousy at Harriet muscling in on her best friend, even if she was the one who set them up in the first place.

And Jean's ex-boyfriend Neil (Neil Maskell) is trying to get his life in order by seeing a psychotherapist.

Her prescribed treatment delivers pure comedy gold.

This sitcom sleeper hit still making a good impression

In fact, the best scenes are rarely to do with mimicry. The moment that had me spluttering into my drink last night was a back and forth between Martin and Jean (the wonderful Jo Hartley from This Is England) after Martin, in a brief stint as a caretaker, stumbled upon a homeless man.

Radio Times review

Sending the characters in your downbeat sitcom to rock bottom carries the risk that the whole show will become suffocatingly sad. We're dipping into that rut a couple of times tonight as jobless, hopeless impressionist Martin (Terry Mynott) says goodbye to his grief-stricken son and quarrels with his equally lacklustre soulmate Jean (Jo Hartley). Martin's even doing the same old Wogan and Attenborough routines over and over.

The show just about veers back from the edge. As usual Neil Maskell does the heavy lifting as Neil the paranoid newsagent, who this week fears that oestrogen in soya milk is giving him moobs. When Neil and Martin go double-dating and Martin meets a woman who enjoys celebrity voices, writer Matt Morgan indulges in a comic set piece he must have had up his sleeve from the start. It was worth waiting for.

Radio Times review

When I saw the premise for Channel 4's new comedy The Mimic, I was furious. It might banjax my long-nurtured plan to write a sitcom for Alistair McGowan, in which he plays a TV impressionist whose personal life is a disaster because of his inability to converse as himself. Scene one: Alistair resolutely embarks on his sixth marriage, but recites the vows in the voices of Peter Snow, Jim Bowen, and Orville. Later, the wedding night is ruined when Alistair does Dot Cotton in his new wife's ear.

Anyway, as it turns out The Mimic is sort of the opposite of that. Terry Mynott is the fabulously named Martin Hurdle, a gentle loser who has only one friend, a dowdy trouper called Jean (Jo Hartley), and no future prospects in his work maintaining the grounds of a faceless pharmaceutical firm. His secret, and his mental release valve, is that he's a brilliant impressionist.

The Mimic is by Russell Brand's old sidekick Matt Morgan, who worked with Mynott on The Morgana Show and VIP. Where they were crass and brash, this is slow, quiet and lovely. It has the vibe of an indie film, possibly one starring a big comedy name gambling their fame to prove they're human and can act.

Mynott has no fame to risk, yet there's still bravery in the way he makes Martin so uninhibitedly genuine and sad. In the first episode he was often filmed to accentuate his isolation. His little triumphs mostly weren't witnessed by anyone. He stopped doing his spot-on Alan Carr in the company car park when people walked into earshot, and his fantastic imagined conversation between Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones faltered when Jean asked who he was talking to and told him to get some sleep.

The Mimic[c/] is a bit more than a sitcom. You wonder not only whether it will still be funny next week and the week after, but also where it will go - what will happen to the hero. Is he a talented man waiting to be discovered or just a lonely man waiting to be loved?

Scenes where Martin met his previously unknown 18-year-old son, and where he took revenge on a bad HR manager by being him on the office tannoy, hinted that his achingly small world is about to expand. We'll be rooting for him to survive the change.

Partial though I'm not to the word "quirky", Channel 4's new midweek sitcom, The Mimic, made a special plea for it, perhaps along with "gentle" and also, at times, "funny". Here was Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott), a man with a dull job amusing himself by doing impressions. Wogan and Ronnie Corbett have become too standardised to impress but you had to laugh at his Al Pacino and his James Earl Jones quibbling with Morgan Freeman. The show didn't entirely depend on mimicry and there was strong support from Jo Hartley as his live-in friend Jean and Neil Maskell (arch psychopath from Utopia) turned up as a compellingly neurotic newsagent.

The first episode found an anxious Martin meeting up with an old flame's 18-year-old son for a burger followed by a DNA test. "If I'm not your dad, we can still be friends," he said. It was droll but unexpectedly touching. When it came back positive, I almost had to stop eating my biscuit.

New Channel 4 comedy The Mimic appears to have been built around the ability of its lead actor, Terry Mynott, to do impressions and there are moments when you wonder whether he provides a solid enough foundation. His Terry Wogan was very wobbly and his David Attenborough was a weird hybrid of Alan Bennett and Ian McKellen. Other impressions are so left-field they have to be visually signposted or cued up by a line of dialogue to make sure we get them.

But there was a promising little sequence as Martin (Mynott's character) sat slumped in front of his television and Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones fought it out over who was best at adding gravitas to a natural-history programme. It's a comedy of underachievement essentially, complete with marimba noodling on the soundtrack to signal the underlying pathos, but it has some lovely downbeat moments and funny silences where some comedies might strive (unsuccessfully) for a big guffaw. Look out for Jo Hartley as Martin's friend Jean too. She's very good, so quietly you might miss it.

The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.

Martin Hurdle - even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical company. There is no hope of promotion from whitewashing graffiti off walls, so he disappears into a multi-coloured vocal hinterland where he can be any number of camp television presenters or, in the sharpest sequence, James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman engaging in a Socratic squabble over who has the better Afro-American larynx for narrating documentaries about penguins.

This ability has not brought Martin any more joy away from work. He lives with Jean (Jo Hartley), a female flatmate who is equally propping up the bar at midlife's last-chance saloon. For all the richness of Martin's interior life set against his humdrum routine, The Mimic could easily struggle to escape its binary parameters, but this first episode swiftly introduced a second outlandish scenario: Martin has discovered that he may have fathered a child 18 years earlier. It's all subject to a DNA test, but when they meet in a pub, the boy is soon crossing his fingers that they won't be related after all. This is a worry Martin articulates to himself through the conduit of Wedding Crashers. "If I didn't know who this guy was, and it turned out to be this guy," says Vince Vaughn, " I would be pretty disappointed." Or was it Owen Wilson?

It'll be worth finding out where The Mimic, already promisingly weird, goes from here. A lot rests on how series creator Matt Morgan marries two distinctly left-field scenarios - incurable impersonator discovers he's sired an adult. It certainly revinvents a branch of entertainment that has felt for a while like a busted flush.