Matt Lucas

Bizarre, medieval fantasy-comedy Krod Mandoon is starting to find its feet. Matt Lucas is in fine fettle this week as the evil Dongalour, trying to outsmart Krod (Sean Maguire) and his hapless band of freedom fighters. "We must find out who the director of communications is and have him slain," says Lucas after a very West-Wing-like press conference. Some of the slapstick is a little too slapdash, but it'll probably become a cult hit so you may as well get into it now.

What is the point in parodying the sword and sorcery genre when it is already mired in absurdity? Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire never comes close to answering the question.

Impressively lavish in its production values, the show desperately needs more jokes put in, or the few it had taken out, to succeed as either broad comedy or fantasy adventure. As it is, it totters ineffectually between the two and feels like a very, very, very long sketch indeed.

Sean Maguire takes the title role as the swashbuckling rebel, who, with a motley band of ineffectual comrades in tow, has the temerity to challenge the authority of the Evil Empire. The Evil Empire's local representative Chancellor Dongalor is played with admirable gusto, but no finesse whatsoever, by Matt Lucas.

Since leaving EastEnders for Hollywood, Maguire has clearly put a lot of effort into developing a convincing physique and the requisite American accent to go with it. And, to be fair, Maguire is actually rather good as Mandoon, displaying a deft touch for self-effacing, mock heroic comedy.

Lucas, on the other hand, is given only the feeblest of characterisation to work with - variations upon cheery, psychotic camp - which becomes very tiresome, very quickly. Every baddie role, even such an idiotic one, needs a little bit of genuine menace, which was sadly and totally lacking from Lucas' performance.

Krod Mandoon does have its funny moments, but there just aren't enough of them. However, there is something likeable about the show and its admirable, if hapless efforts to entertain. Like Krod Mandoon himself, it is endearing but ineffectual.

I came to Krod Mandoon (BBC2) cold, as it were, which is probably the best way to come... Oh, grow up! But don't bother doing so before you watch Krod, which is a sitcom of inordinate silliness aimed at sofa-bound bonding pairs of, I assume, teenage boys who have outgrown Little Britain and their dads who loved Red Dwarf.

Krod is an amusingly needy-but-buff hero (a smartly cast Sean Maguire) battling Matt Lucas, the evil Dongalor, who wears fur and is into beheading and all the usual power-crazed stuff you get in the kind of magic kingdom that's a few Hobbits short of Middle-Earth. The only completely baffling - apart from everything that's meant to be baffling, obviously - thing about Krod is why there was an hour of it, even for an opener, when no sitcom in TV history has sustained comedy for 60 consecutive minutes.

At the very opposite end of the comedy scale was Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a fantasy satire starring Matt Lucas. Anyone who had seen the title would have calculated the chances of it not being bad as pitifully low.

It is a title that makes it very clear that you are entering a world where the name "Krod Mandoon" is a potent comedy currency - a world where knights say "Ni!", and every night is 2-4-1 down the Student Union bar. Krod Mandoon (played, with wilful casting randomness, by Sean Maguire, aka Tegs from Grange Hill) is an uptight warrior. His gang of freedom fighters include a black jive-talking genie with erratic magical powers, and Muldoon's pugilistic girlfriend - a foxy pagan who refuses to wear knickers. This threadbare band of wackily inverted stereotypes has an arch-nemesis: Chancellor Dongalor (Matt Lucas), whose comedy chops are left uselessly over-revved on lines as poor as "I am scared of nothing! Except turtles. They give me the willies".

The problem with the show is that, as a genre, fantasy is, of course, already absolutely ludicrous. You can't satirise it by making it even more ludicrous - to do so just results in an Upper Sixth trainwreck of wee-wee-jokes, mild homophobia and gurning.

Bad comedy is a peculiar thing, isn't it? Watching it is rather like looking at the emperor's new clothes - slightly uncomfortable, more than a little embarrassing, with the lurking dread that maybe it isn't them at all who's at fault, but you, you and your own lame-arsed sense of humour.

Disclaimers aside, I think we can all agree on one thing: BBC2's spoof-adventure Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire is definitely not funny. Worse: it's boring. Had the emperor walked out wearing it, no one would have been fooled, though they may have had a few laughs, which is more than I got last night.

Basically, Kröd, for reasons unknown, is on a mission to free General Arcadius (no, me neither) who's been imprisoned by the evil emperor (him again!) for some or other reason. Of course, Kröd - played somewhat improbably by the Nineties pin-up Sean Maguire - isn't alone. With him he brings a hapless band of conspirators: Zezelryck the warlock, doing his best Eddie Murphy impression, Aneka the knickerless warrior princess who'd rather be stripping than duelling (incidentally, the only female character. Thanks for the thought, guys!) and Loquasto, half-man, half-pig. Or, possibly, just suffering from some kind of swine flu.

Speaking of emperors, what's Matt Lucas doing playing this one? He's actually funny, the only decent thing in it. I wonder if he gets to write his own lines? I could've sworn the script improved considerably when he appeared, playing a David Brent-inspired dictator, out to claim the blood of Maguire's Kröd. I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned the sooner he does, the better. Though I won't be sticking around in the meantime. Next!

There are some things you really shouldn't laugh at, like Matt Lucas sporting an enormous pubic wig and querying 'can I pull this off?' or jokes that depend on punning the name Horst Draper ('are you fit to mount a steed?'). But there was something so cheerily daft about Krod Mandoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire that my sides were split.

It helped that the likes of Lord Of The Rings, Doctor Who and swords 'n' sandals epics such as 300 are ripe for a cheeky rip-off. If you take those kinds of capers deadly seriously then you'd best give Krod a wide berth. But if you enjoy fantasy adventure but wish they weren't so stuck up their own allegories then Krod, complete with its festival of umlauts, is right up your alley.

Buffed-up ex-EastEnder urchin Sean Maguire has carved out a surprising niche as a leather loinclothed spoof action hero - hey, it's a niche - and Krod is a blood brother to the muscle-bound hunk he played in Meet The Spartans. But this time with a much better script. Muscles popping out of his jerkin, Maguire's Krod is a new man in rebel hero's clothing, fretting about hostile work environments and political correctness when he should be sticking it to the bad guy. He makes a fine foil to deliciously evil Lucas, who has a big, bouncy ball as the evil Dongalor.

Subtle it isn't but Kröd works because, though this is satire drawn with a broad brush, there's still a strong story and juicy characters to sink your teeth into. Peppered with neat cameos (The Thick Of It fans will relish Roger Allam and Alex MacQueen taking turns at stealing scenes) and awash with saucy sorcery, it's the best rubbish comedy to come along in dark ages.

There was more time-travelling drag in Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a sword and sorcery comedy that doesn't quite know what speed to be set at. It's funny, then not, funny, then not, like a car stuttering into life, then packing up. The shtick is that Matt Lucas plays a bad Sheriff of Nottingham type in the Middle Ages, Sean Maguire the hero out to ruin his despot-ery, aided by a gang of outlaws all with modern-seeming foibles.

Maguire's love interest is a pagan who delights in her sluttery. He has a magician who can't do magic and talks in sassy street talk. He has a patrician guardian who dies, and whose lover is a camp, sex-obsessed Spanish guy. Maguire is vain and confused. Lucas has lots of fun rolling his "r"s villainously. It's not terrible or pointless, but there were as many clouds as patches of sunshine. A lot of the jokes are physical (the pagan woman can't stop body-flipping) or based on deliberate comic mis-timing, with people looking askance after someone else says something silly. It tumbled along and then it was gone, a frippery - neither offensively bad, nor resoundingly funny.

The third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look revealed that David Mitchell and Robert Webb can flit more deftly than Matt Lucas between comedy series (Peep Show) and sketch show. The first of the sketches encapsulated Mitchell and Webb's grasp of comic brevity: it gently satirised the conventions of a Poirot mystery. As their unmasking approached, the killer suddenly acquired a villainous voice and cigarette holder. The duo also made a very funny joke out of that thing we do when looking around the house for something, patting both our pockets as we rock on our knees.

Best of all was a satire of The Apprentice, which had the duo as TV executives watching a tape of a show featuring a relatively meek CEO - a Sugar-lite - dismissing a contestant politely and apologetically. But it didn't quite work, the executives thought, and so rethought the concept. "We deliberately pick 16 idiots - real idiots, arseholes as well," one of the men said, "and then we watch them screw everything up." But honestly, who would want to watch that?

Sean Maguire Interview

Sean Maguire chats about breaking the States, working with Matt Lucas and smacking himself with a flaming sword...

Sean Maguire, last seen in 300 spoof Meet The Spartans, rolls out his splendid torso again for this good-looking TV series parodying ancient times. Now we're in the realm of the Meconian Empire and he's a freedom fighter trying to vanquish evil Chancellor Dongalor (Matt Lucas) before he figures out how to work a baffling weapon of mass destruction called the Eye of Gulga Grymna. Maguire is on good form but the rotund, baby-faced Lucas steals the show; he's contrary, powerful, bloodthirsty, ridiculously attired - and clearly loving every minute of it.