Stephen Mangan

Blog Review

The Comedy Showcase season has provided fairly consistent laughs and some amusing one-off ideas, but Free Agents is undoubtedly the first episode that seems to warrant further episodes...

If any theme has emerged from this range of Comedy Showcases, it has been to see how far the boundaries of taste can be pushed. Here, Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan play theatrical agents who have been bruised by past relationships and are now having an unsatisfactory nonaffair driven by his need to sleep on her sofa. He is traumatised with guilt for abandoning his children and she feels responsible for the death of her fiancé. Both are needy, only their needs are different. There is a good deal of snappy banter between the two, but Anthony Head as their boss steals the show as a pervy old goat out of whose mouth pours an unending stream of uncensored filth. It's like being confronted by an erection on screen - more amazing than shocking.

There's little funnier than other people's emotional damage and the consequent mess they make of things, so Chris Niel's tale of two colleagues - he an estranged dad, she lately availed of a dead fiance - who have casual sex and have to deal with the aftermath is very funny indeed. Sharon Horgan (Pulling and Angelo's) and Green Wing's Stephen Mangan star as the pair, with Anthony Head their coke-snorting, sex-crazed boss ("You've been bashing some gash, haven't you?"). Who knew Rupert Giles from Buffy could be so foul-mouthed? To think he kissed Joyce Summers with that mouth.

Stephen Mangan interview: 'I've got a face for comedy'

Vain, self-obsessed, arrogant - Stephen Mangan has a knack for bringing the worst out in himself for his roles, he tells Maddy Costa.