Nick Frost

Nick Frost's Mr Sloane: Best comedy of the year

Nick Frost's 1960s tragi-comedy - starring actress of the moment Olivia Colman - is Britain's answer to Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Mr Sloane review

The real asset here is Nick Frost, a performer with such a natural propensity for comedy he could probably make castration seem funny.

Robert Weide, producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is the unlikely writer and director of this new comedy set in Watford in the late 1960s. Nick Frost stars as the accountant whose drab world is anything but swinging. He's lost his wife (Olivia Colman) and mislaid his self-esteem, leaving him trying to piece together his life.

Botched suicide attempts pop up a lot in films and TV and, here, the man putting his head in the noose and kicking away the stool is Jeremy Sloane, who has lost his job and his wife all in the same day.

Coincidentally, a similar event also opens the sitcom Uncle, which starts its terrestrial re-run on BBC One tonight.

But fate has other plans for Jeremy in this six-part comedy series specially created for actor Nick Frost by Curb Your Enthusiasm producer director Robert B Weide. (Weide also directed How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, starring Frost's friend Simon Pegg.)

Mr Sloane is set in 1969 in Watford - which is just far enough from London to have missed out on the Swinging Sixties and light years away from the glamour of Mad Men.

But it all looks glorious, confident and reassuringly expensive.

Tonight's double bill sees Mr Sloane get off to a rocky start in his new job as a substitute teacher and there are scenes set in a boozer that are filled with ­realistically snappy and rambling banter.

Sloane's friends include Peter Serafinowicz as gambling addict Ross, who is at the centre of a lovely running joke about the vagaries of 1960s-style parenting, while Olivia Colman appears in flashbacks as Sloane's wife Janet.

But even this TV Bafta darling is upstaged by Ophelia ­Lovibond, as Sloane's new love interest.

With an accent that's bang on the money, Robin is a groovy American half his age with a habit of bumping into him at his most embarrassing moments.

But she finds Sloane endearing, rather than disgusting - and you will, too.

Radio Times review

In the past decade Nick Frost has gone from being Simon Pegg's bumbling sidekick to a Hollywood film star in his own right. So it's a treat to have him back on the small screen in a comedy written especially for him by Curb Your Enthusiasm director/producer Robert B Weide.

Set in 1969 in buttoned-up Watford, Mr Sloane is about a chap so hapless he can't even succeed at his own suicide. In the opening scene he tries to hang himself but crashes to the floor, bringing half the ceiling with him. He's lost his job, his wife and is prone to rose-tinted daydreams at odds with horn-rimmed reality.

Although this first episode is short on belly laughs, it goes down as easily as a glass of Babycham thanks to a tip-top cast (including Olivia Colman as estranged spouse) and its deliciously drab setting.

Why you must watch Nick Frost in Mr Sloane

It's a pitch perfect piece of TV, telling its bittersweet story with wit and warmth and deft psychological insight.

Fame comes at a cost it would seem as the star of Sky Atlantic comedy Mr Sloane believes his co-star has been priced out of the market after winning big at the Baftas. The Sun reports Nick Frost as joking that Olivia Colman would be far too expensive to bring back as his on-screen wife for a second series after she scored a hat-trick at the TV awards. "We could never afford her now," said Frost. "If we do a second series, we'll have to have a chimp play my wife."

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