Rory Kinnear

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.

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.

The trailers for Count Arthur Strong made it appear as funny as John Inverdale's objectionable analysis of Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli. However, appearances can be deceptive.

Though it's saddled with an awful laughter track, the button lent on at random intervals, Count Arthur Strong - the character and the sitcom - is hewn from the great British tradition of eccentricity. It's not bending over backwards to appear wacky, it's genuinely strange.

This means parts are very funny while other moments - to borrow the catchphrase of angry cafe owner Bulent, the pick of the supporting cast - are 'what the flip?' But there were three or four laugh-out-loud moments in its opening episode, a rare thing for a British sitcom.

Count Arthur Strong is played by co-writer/creator Steve Delaney, who delivers every line as if he's about to embark on a bombing mission on the toilet - he keeps a gong to disguise the noise.

Strong is a former comedian, now languishing in obscurity, whose life is filled with oddballs and even odder lines of thought. Into his life stumbles Michael, the son of his ex-comedy partner, researching a book about his dead and not much loved dad. And that's about it for set-up.

It's the interplay between the bravura Delaney and Rory Kinnear, neatly underplaying Michael, that keeps Count Arthur Strong on track when too much weirdness threatens to derail it. There are tumbleweed moments but, with Graham 'Father Ted' Linehan on co-writing duty, there's comedy gold too.

One exchange, when Arthur summed up Michael's life thus: 'And you went on to write books about anal museums,' sweetly struck the comedy spot. Add to that Michael ranting about plurals not needing apostrophes - yay, go Michael - and what you've got is a peculiar treat that lurches from hit to miss and back with peculiar abandon. Give it a go.

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.

The challenge for much-loved radio institutions transferring to TV is introducing themselves to a new audience while keeping the loyal fanbase onside. On the basis of this series opener, Count Arthur Strong could go either way. As always, Steve Delaney's doddery, malapropistic and memory-challenged 'showbiz legend' manages some funny moments, but this still feels almost aggressively old school in its format and furthermore, very much like a show that might as well still be on the wireless.

The story arc involves Rory Kinnear's author Michael Baker attempting to write his father's biography. His father Max, was Count Arthur's comedy partner. And so it begins. Oddly, this show may be redeemed by its promising minor characters: Kinnear is amusingly prissy and pedantic, and we like the look of Chris Ryman as café owner Bulent too. Still, the jury's out for now.