Morgan Freeman

After a tiny rest stop, a new series of well-rehearsed and lightly promotional chat begins. Jack Whitehall, very much the gift that keeps on giving on the red sofa, returns yet again - this time to discuss his current, and slightly underwhelming, starring role in BBC One's Decline and Fall. Operating at about the same level of old pro is the duo of Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, here to plug pensioner heist movie Going in Style.

Radio Times review

Impressionist Lewis Macleod, the latest recruit to Dead Ringers, now gets his own show. Duncan Wisbey and Julian Dutton have contrived some fairly wacky situations to exploit their mate's best voices.

Morgan Freeman plays Fletcher in Porridge; Gregg Wallace sings a filthy love song to Mary Berry (Kate O'Sullivan); and a running gag has Benedict Cumberbatch turning up inopportunely to spout purple prose in the manner of Sherlock Holmes.

The show claims that Macleod has been hired to impersonate movie stars who refuse to re-record their inaudible lines. We want more details.

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.

Impressionist Terry Mynott, last seen in Very Important People, stars as stuck-in-a-rut odd-jobs man Martin in this downbeat comedy drama. Whenever things look bleak, Martin's escape valve is to air his thoughts through other people's voices. From Terry Wogan to Morgan Freeman, anybody's voice is preferable to his own - until an old flame gives him pause for thought, claiming he's the father of her 18-year-old son. Can mimicry help him handle that one?

For a sitcom, this is at the loose, gentle end of the spectrum. There aren't many out-and-out gags, it's filmed on location, there's no laughter track - if it were an hour long, you'd call it a comedy drama.

Our sort-of-hero is Martin (Terry Mynott), who has a dead-end job doing site maintenance for a drugs company (called, cheekily, CelPharm). When we meet Martin, he's in a traffic jam, amusing himself with a scabrous impression of Terry Wogan ("It's mornings like this, I wish I was back in Phuket bouncing a ladyboy on each knee...") and we soon gather that this is Martin's Walter Mitty-style escape.

He may be a man adrift, but his impression of Morgan Freeman arguing with James Earl Jones is uncanny (his Ronnie Corbett less so). What threatens to shake up Martin's world is learning he may have a son he has never met. That's if the DNA test pans out...

If, like us, you're of the opinion that impression shows got a bit stale the thousandth time Jon Culshaw declared "My fellow Americans" on Dead Ringers, then you might appreciate the new take on the comedy sub-genre offered up by The Mimic.

Terry Mynott is the star of this not-entirely uplifting sitcom, playing an unremarkable maintenance man with a hidden talent for celebrity impressions. From Terry Wogan to Morgan Freeman, he can be pretend to be pretty much anyone - but he's soon brought back to reality when he discovers that he may be the father of his ex's 18-year-old son.