Mathew Baynton

James Corden puts the laddy banter of A League Of Their Own on hold to co-star in this blackly comic crime caper. It's a twisted and oddly gripping tale, following a pair of life's losers getting in way over their heads when a car crash unleashes a bizarre chain of events involving a mobile phone, a kidnapping and a case of mistaken leg amputation.

Corden's new comedy best friend here is Horrible Histories' Mathew Baynton, who bags a co-writing credit (with Corden) and steals the show as baleful Sam, a nerdy town-planning officer pining for his ex, playing the proverbial rabbit caught in the headlights to perfection.

Radio Times review

James Corden's first narrative comedy since Gavin & Stacey does not disappoint, but is a quite different beast. Although Corden's character, office mailroom man Phil, could be Smithy's more optimistic cousin, this is no straight sitcom. It's a lavishly filmed and surprisingly gripping comic thriller about two meek losers caught in a kidnapping caper.

Corden is not the lead: his co-writer Mathew Baynton proves to be at home driving the action as Sam, a milksop who answers a phone at the scene of a car crash and becomes an unwilling hero. Think The Bourne Identity, remade by the Coen brothers, starring a hipster Frank Spencer.

Baynton and Corden's refusal to resort to spoof means the characters are likeable, the jokes are properly funny and the action is convincing. You'll want to know what happens next.

Just as the weather turns rotten, here's The Wrong Mans, a bit of fun with a smart enough script and some actual jokes. It's about two hapless chaps who get completely out of their depth in a Hitchcockian adventure with kidnappers, spies and gangsters. Nervous council employee Phil (played endearingly by Mathew Baynton of Horrible Histories) witnesses a car crash, picks up the victim's phone and gets mistaken for someone else by bad guys. His brash colleague Sam insists they "roll deep" and play things out.

It co-stars and is co-written by James Corden... wait, did I lose you there? I know: Corden is a divisive figure, who became so ubiquitous a few years ago that the very sight of his grinning face - shouting about his celebrity pals, flirting with Lily Allen, singing the England football team song, showing off at award ceremonies, etc - could induce sheer rage in otherwise reasonable people. While he always had his fans, there were as many who saw him as a representation of everything grim about modern celebrity culture. But, after an apologetic autobiography, an award-winning theatre run and the forthcoming biopic about Britain's Got Talent winner Paul Potts, Corden seems to be clawing his way out of the backlash. And the sheer energy of this new six-part series indicates that he's gone back to his strengths, co-writing himself a supporting part in an audience-pleasing entertainment, just as he did with Gavin & Stacey.

He is still, essentially, playing that Corden character that became so annoying, but the effect is lessened thanks to a strong plot, script and cast - full of familiar faces in cameo roles, presumably his celebrity pals.

This new comedy drama written by and starring James Corden and Horrible Histories' Mathew Baynton is quite good. What's remarkable is the wealth of on-screen talent involved, and I don't just mean Dawn French, Rebecca Front, Nick Moran, Homeland's David Harewood and Him & Her's Sarah Solemani. When you can employ Paul Higgins (The Thick of It) and Twenty Twelve's Vincent Franklin in the seemingly throwaway roles of traffic cops, then that is casting in depth. Taking its title from Hitchcock's 1956 thriller of mistaken identity, The Wrong Man, it stars Baynton as a Berkshire County Council office drudge accidentally mixed up in a criminal conspiracy. Corden is on his best form as his excitable colleague.

Mathew Baynton interview

The co-creator of James Corden's new BBC2 comedy thriller The Wrong Mans is preparing to be ubiquitous.

It's no secret that many alleged "grown-ups" are supplementing their haphazard history educations with CBBC's Horrible Histories, back for its fifth series with lovely, daft input from The League of Gentlemen. Tiny, mighty Sarah Hadland from Miranda and funny, clever Alice Lowe, writer of Sightseers are regular faces too. To adult eyes, Horrible Histories has the distinct feel of a group of bright, young, erudite, writery-actory sparks having a tremendously good time. One that they probably wouldn't be permitted to have anywhere else on telly.

Kids love them as they are the most peculiar sort of grown-ups. The sort of wonky uncles and aunties who turn up to tea with mild hangovers, scant regard for etiquette and a host of stories about idiot highway men, Second World War bat bombs (bombs attached to bats, prone to exploding before they left the American base) and an imaginary CD compilation called Now That's What I Call Spartan Warrior Music.

There's something about the Horrible Histories gang I find terrifically, stupidly, funny. They're the best bits of Monty Python, Roald Dahl, Tiswas, BBC2's The Tudors and The Young Ones all shoved into a bin and bashed with a stick. "Divorced, beheaded and Died! Divorced, Beheaded, Survived!" is the song that carousels in my mind whenever anyone mentions Henry VIII. Horrible Histories drummed the order of Henry's wives and their fates into my mind where A-level cramming failed forlornly. If only Mathew Baynton and Ben Willbond had shown up at my school in the Nineties and sung a few songs about the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, I could have a proper job now. Not just writing down stuff I think, drinking Earl Grey and taking Yodel deliveries in for neighbours.

We don't need writers. Not in the sense that we need farmers, plumbers or even estate agents. Consequently, many of history's greatest wordsmiths - all of whom had bills to pay - put their literary flair to some surprising uses before finding success.

Ian Leslie presents this new comedy show uncovering the surprising nine-to-fives of our literary idols' formative years. With Mathew Baynton and John Finnemore among the guests, the show exposes the bizarre early writings of extraordinary authors and poets, from Jilly Cooper's abortive foray into war reporting to Hunter S Thompson's unlikely stint in customer relations for a major American airline.