Neil Maskell

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.

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.

This unassuming comedy may be a bit scattered and light on laughs, but there's something there. The tone is even more bittersweet and wistful tonight, as hero Martin regrets his missed opportunities and takes refuge once again in his celebrity voices (Schwarzenegger holding a leaf blower works well).

"Life happens. Time goes past," muses his old flame Dionne, mother of the 18-year-old son that Martin never knew he had. We get the feeling she's harbouring another bombshell, too.

Meanwhile, in another part of the plot, there's Neil Maskell as Martin's newsagent friend. Maskell was last seen as a terrifyingly low-key hitman in Utopia. He's just as good here in a wildly different sort of role and you can't help wishing we saw more of him.

Martin Hurdle continues to hide in plain sight in this week's second episode of the comedy drama, his vocal abilities employed to seduce a swimsuit model over the phone (as Christopher Walken), to socialise with strangers in a pub (as an Irishman) and to amuse his long-lost son (as Ian McKellen), whose mother he re-encounters tonight. Who the real Martin is, however, remains an engrossing mystery: unless his entire personality can be constructed from life's little disappointments, setbacks and missed opportunities.

The laughs come mostly from Terry Mynott's spot-on impressions or his deadbeat pal, Neil (Neil Maskell), who's considering dating someone he met online who has a chocolate lab, ('Some kind of Willy Wonka shit'). It's another beautifully judged blend of humour and pathos: one false step and it could be either dismal farce or Taxi Driver-esque alienation horror. No danger of either just yet, though: in Martin, Terry Mynott has created a tragicomic character it's impossible not to root for.

There's a lot that's very, very good about The Mimic, which stars the gifted impressionist Terry Mynott as lowly maintenance man Martin Hurdle.

It's the second episode tonight, but if you missed the first all you need to know is that Martin escapes his humdrum life by doing other people's voices - everyone from Alan Carr to Christopher Walken - and last week he discovered he has an 18-year-old son called Steven. Probably. We're still waiting for the results of the DNA test.

As a means of doing something more interesting with impressions than just going down the Dead Ringers route (or Very Important People, which was Mynott's last gig) this gets full marks for originality.

And the excellent supporting cast includes Ami Metcalf (last seen playing the young Kathy Burke in Walking And Talking) who plays colleague Chelsea, and Neil Maskell (fresh from playing Utopia's hit man) as a depressed newsagent whose foray into internet dating tonight is inspired.

But the mixture of occasionally crude humour and misty-eyed pathos is a tough one to pull off successfully. And that soundtrack is one dollop of syrup too far.

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.