Rory Kinnear

The television version of Steve Delaney's Radio 4 series has jaggedly divided both audiences and critics. But I will heretically declare that I think it's been a hugely successful transfer and I love the Count (Delaney) on television even more than I do on radio. So there.

There's been a subtle poignancy to the TV series and the feel of a proper ensemble comedy as Delaney and co-writer/director Graham Linehan surrounded Arthur with a clutch of endearing misfit friends. And one sensible friend, Michael, biographer and son of Arthur's one-time music hall collaborator, played by the peerless Rory Kinnear. As the series ends Arthur is still mourning the loss of his friend Katya and decides to hold a seance. It's sad and funny.

Inept human being Count Arthur Strong (Steve Delaney) has become a dog walker and decides to enlist one of the pooches in a bid for stardom when he auditions for a Britain's Got Talent-type show. It's all as hopeless as you would expect - and by you, I mean the two or three other people who are watching Count Arthur Strong. I knew it would be a niche delight, but there you are, it's still a delight, albeit one withering in obscurity.

The brilliant Rory Kinnear is brilliant again as hapless biographer Michael, this time under anaesthetic after a dog bite, minutes after he's tried to describe his assailant to the world's worst police sketch artist. A surreal treasure.

Populated by doddering characters and stylistically channelling the old-school British sitcom, Steve Delaney and Graham Linehan's comedy isn't the most exciting prospect. That's a shame, because it's very funny. This penultimate episode, in which Arthur inadvertently infiltrates the staff of a hospital where Michael (Rory Kinnear) is being treated, climaxes in an incredibly artful punchline pile-up. In great sitcom tradition, there's emotional resonance here that goes beyond farce, with nods to loss and loneliness scattered throughout.

Count Arthur Strong, a transfer of Steve Delany's infinitely long-running Radio 4 show to TV, takes the first few minutes of its first episode to break the audience in to what the show is going to be.

Opening with proper thesp and straight-man-in-chief Rory Kinnear, the show begins in single-camera glossiness, and slowly guides the viewer, via a hinting laugh track and an open door into the Count's multi-camera world.

Graham Linehan has joined Count Arthur creator and performer Delany as co-writer of the TV version of the show, and it's difficult not read this as a version The IT Crowd's opening scene, albeit with a much more pronounced tonal and visual shift.

In subsequent episodes, we open with a parpy theme tune and Arthur (Delany) and Michael (Kinnear) standing in front of a proscenium arch, which is about right for the old-school staginess of the piece.

It's already been commissioned for a second series and no wonder. Former radio cult Count Arthur Strong, as played by the remarkable Steve Delaney, is this summer's unlikely comedy hero, a malaprop-prone language mangler who exists in a world entirely of his own creation. Tonight Arthur bags a small part in a radio play, which tickles his surreal ego no end and gives Rory Kinnear as long-suffering Martin (aka Michael) even more to contend with than usual.

If awkwardness were an Olympic event, Arthur Strong would be a gold medallist. The music-hall aficionado staggers around as if glued to an ironing board, and has to forcibly eject words as if passing a kidney stone. Like that other fully realised comic character John Shuttleworth, he polarises opinion, but to his loyal fans the Count is cryingly funny.

There are shades of Hancock this week as our delusional artiste lands a part in a radio play (the way he deflates the pseuds' corner of a read-through is delicious). As in previous weeks, the plot is small but neat. And the modern practice of injecting dramatic heft into sitcom (Tom Hollander in Rev, Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi in Vicious and now Rory Kinnear as Arthur's unfortunate new best friend) is paying rich rewards. The series has been recomissioned after just one episode - take note, Ben Elton. Long live Count Arthur!

You can see why Count Arthur Strong has been granted a second series already. The Graham Linehan factor. The evidently tight budget, smartly expended. And an edge that tends to be missing from pre-watershed sitcoms. It remains a slippery beast, at once anachronistic (Arthur's body induces nausea at a life-drawing class) and forward-thinking (Arthur is introduced to the internet, with disastrous results).

Steve Delaney's word-mangling, monologue-dispensing throwback might have struggled to sustain a TV sitcom alone, but stalwart support from Rory Kinnear (as Michael), among others, adds essential layers to the comedy. And a superbly sustained gag about Michael's inadvertent racism keeps the chuckles bubbling along, climaxing in a Jack the Ripper tour by ice-cream van that defies easy explanation by a humble TV reviewer. Odd, but undeniably likeable.

Radio Times review

I laughed so helplessly at this episode that I had to re-apply my mascara, and I was still chortling on my way out of the office and on the train home. Count Arthur Strong, half-witted, malapropism-prone former music-hall star (a masterly comic creation by Steve Delaney) joins the modern world at last when his new friend Michael (Rory Kinnear) gets him on the internet. Or on "the Ilfracombe" as the Count has it. Soon his horizons broaden, and not just because "I'm going to tell that Stephen Fry what I think of him".

There's no point in trying to explain further. I will say only that Arthur decides to fulfil his dream of doing Jack the Ripper tours from an ice-cream van complete with chimes.

Rory Kinnear interview

Despite the hype, Rory Kinnear will not be the new Time Lord. But with starring roles in BBC comedy Count Arthur Strong and an unmissable new Channel 4 drama, his TV future looks bright.

Good radio comedy could not have sounded less funny on television, nor canned laughter more ironic. Something was surely lost in translation in the BBC's transposition of the Sony Radio Academy-award-winning show Count Arthur Strong into prime-time TV.

Did anyone muster a laugh when Steve Delaney's doddery old former variety star, Arthur Strong, opened his front door and said to hapless young Michael (Rory Kinnear): "You rang the bell. I've broken a plate because of you. That was dishwasher safe, that was"? Cue canned laughter. Or when he asked what Michael did for a living: "I'm an author," replied Michael, to which Arthur puzzled: "I thought your name was Michael... I'm Arthur." Cue more canned laughter. Also cue head-scratching from those at home who had a soft spot for the radio show's silly yet lovable humour, but failed to see the charm of these dull-witted scenes, attempting to pass for OAP slapstick.

It is sad - and perplexing - that it didn't work, given that it is written by Delaney and Father Ted creator Graham Linehan. Delaney originally created the character in the 1980s, resurrecting him for the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997 to much acclaim, and after that, for radio since 2004. Astonishingly, given its success in these other mediums, the most recent incarnation as a TV sitcom refused to spark into life: the greasy caff was filled with a man wearing a sandwich board, an old dear from Poland and some others who looked like extras from Last of the Summer Wine, while an angry café manager said "What the flip?" a lot at these old people's dribbling stupidities. The likeable Kinnear, playing the uptight son of Strong's ex-variety partner, went some way to redeem the whole thing with his straight-man act as a tormented soul.

Visually, it was so derivative that it seemed deliberate, as if the nostalgia of flock wallpaper, long-fringed lamps, and Strong's pencilled-on Hitler moustache could pass for good, funny entertaining. That said, Strong is too much of a radio institution to be condemned to the TV rubbish heap. Perhaps this opening episode just suffered a severe case of first-night nerves.