Martin Freeman

From the Friday vault: Hardware with Martin Freeman

Martin Freeman's stock is going through the roof these days given his brilliant performance in Sherlock and, what I'm already assuming is brilliant in the upcoming Peter Jackson fantasy epic, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, as Bilbo Baggins. Many were 'introduced' to Martin back in 2001 as Tim in Ricky Gervais' The Office. Post Office, Freeman starred in Hardware, a short-lived situation comedy set in Hamway's Hardware Store in London.

It's hard not to like Ashley Jensen, the Scottish actress who was catapulted to fame when she played Ricky Gervais's accident-prone best friend Maggie in Extras. Blessed with an open face, a slightly awkward manner and a wry sense of humour - much like Martin Freeman, her male equivalent in The Office, in fact - she's fast become a popular hit with audiences and a shoo-in for TV producers looking to cast a sympathetic female lead. So it may come as a surprise to viewers of this sitcom pilot episode to find her playing a high-powered ad executive called Erin, who has a penchant for shouting things like, "Unless the answer is yes, I don't want to know!" Glimmers of vulnerability appear, though, as she finds her boyfriend Mike (Raza Jaffrey) in bed with another woman and goes on a vengeful spending spree with his money - buying, among other things, a dilapidated farm which, in a moment of blind inspiration, she decides to actually take on. And so Erin arrives in Yorkshire to meet Olive (Jean Heywood), her cantankerous sitting tenant; Clive (Michael Hodgson), the ale-soaked local handyman; Judith (Sylvestra Le Touzel), her horsey neighbour; and a cast of other bucolic types. The result is a sitcom that, given a bit of spit and polish and a generous BBC One budget, might just inherit The Vicar of Dibley's mud-flecked crown.

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Micro Men was a light-hearted, cleverly realised and wholly entertaining exercise in techno-nostalgia about the battle for dominance of the British home computer market of the eighties.

In one corner Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong), the maverick and tempestuously bad-tempered inventor, in the other, his ex-employee Christopher Curry (Martin Freeman), founder of Acorn computers. Their bitter rivalry culminated in an actual pub brawl, lovingly recreated in the film.

All good fun, but what was going on with Armstrong's make-up? It was terribly distracting. Someone needs to invent a bald wig that doesn't look like a flesh-tone swimming cap.

More mad, bad-hair acting was available in Micro Men, a faction drama based on the competition between Clive Sinclair and someone who wasn't Clive Sinclair but was very similar. Both of them made crap computers that weren't anything like as good as American ones or Korean ones or Malaysian ones. They finally went bust and were sold to Alan Sugar.

The initial problem with this drama was that soldering as a central activity really isn't very dramatic, though marginally more exciting than men who solder. While factually based on the cut-throat race to be the first official computer to be put in schools, the plot wasn't quite as nail-biting as it sounds. The producers obviously gleaned that the dullness of their contestants might be a stumbling block, so they cast a pair of comics, Alexander Armstrong as Sinclair and Martin Freeman as not-Sinclair. They did what comics invariably do in dramas: they stopped being funny. A comic who's not being funny is like a rubber tin-opener.

All was not lost, though. Riding to the rescue was Armstrong's wig, a thing of radiant, relentless hilarity. Imagine one of those "hey you, Jimmy" Scottish tam-o'-shanters, available from joke shops, with the orange hair attached. Now imagine it without the hat. There was just a shiny, bald, plastic pate with a marmalade nylon fringe. It gave an award-winning performance. When the hair was on screen, you couldn't take your eyes off it. Neither could the rest of the cast. They watched Armstrong's head with fascination. What would it do next? Well, we know what it did next. It invented the C5 and had affairs with ridiculously young girls, revealing a great and comforting truth that there is no dumb idiot like a really clever dumb idiot.