Tim McInnerny

Eddie the Eagle review

The story of Eddie The Eagle is turned into an excellent family comedy drama by Dexter Fletcher.

Radio Times review

It would be tempting to think that the focus of this story is its creator, David Walliams, who was no stranger to rocking a frock in Little Britain and Come Fly with Me. But the comic actor turned children's writer has a serious point to make in this uplifting version of his debut novel.

Our hero is 12-year-old Dennis (Billy Kennedy), who lives with his couch-potato dad and unreconstructed brother. Dennis is missing his mother, who has left home to live with a roofer, but he soon finds an escape.

A gifted footballer, Dennis also discovers through his new friend Lisa (the school's coolest girl), that wearing dresses makes him happy. How will he reconcile his interests, or sneak past his fashion-police teachers?

Walliams's knack of championing the outsider and celebrating difference shines out of a story he says isn't autobiographical, but is "very personal". It's no wonder such a quality cast signed up, including Jennifer Saunders, Tim McInnerny, Steve Speirs and James Buckley, who has some of the best lines as a supremely negative PE teacher. Even supermodel Kate Moss gets to shake a tailfeather, and Walliams allows himself a cameo as a camp referee.

It's a refreshingly unusual Christmas treat with a punch-the-air final act, and a great use of Queen - have a guess which song they use.

Radio Times review

In a year when a celeb seemed to pop off every week, some losses were keener than others. Rik Mayall was 56 when he died suddenly in June: nowhere near retirement, as evidenced by his TV comeback last year in Man Down. That show's bereft creator, Greg Davies, contributes to this documentary, as do Michael Palin, Lenny Henry, Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle, Tim McInnerny and Ruby Wax.

The rare footage here should illustrate how Mayall justified the over-used phrase "force of nature". He was like a child eternally refusing to grow up. That's why it was so shocking when he turned out not to be unstoppable after all.

A young lad spots Kate Moss in a Vogue fashion spread and falls in love - with frocks. Twelve-year-old Dennis is fed up with everything after his parents split; could dressing up as "Denise" cheer him up? Yes, it turns out, in this sweet-natured adaptation of David Walliams's children's book (following previous Crimbo versions of his Gangsta Granny and Mr Stink).

OK, so Moss's cameo doesn't display any hidden thespian talents and everything is resolved extremely conveniently, but it aims to celebrate difference and individuality, which can't be too bad, given how our commercially-driven youth culture too often tells kids that there's a "right" way to look. And with Jennifer Saunders, James Buckley, Tim McInnerny and Walliams himself popping up among the grown-ups, there's enough here to keep kids and hungover adults amused.

Radio Times review

Penned by seasoned playwright Shelagh Stephenson, this comedy series pits Anna (Haydn Gwynne) and Jim (Blackadder star Tim McInnerny) against a succession of wearisome and tactless guests as they take up the couple's offer, made to all and sundry, of a quiet weekend at their rural home.

Unfortunately, most of those who take them at their word are the ones they never in a million years dreamt would turn up. And guests, like fish, tend to stink after three days. This week it's the turn of uncompromising elderly couple Joan (Patricia Hodge) and Colin (Ron Cook), who love their bagpipe music, to go rancid on them.

We are stuck with half-hearted bilge such as Radio 4's HR in which two well-known figures of the screen and stage, Jonathan Pryce and Nicholas Le Provost, flounder on a sea of scripted mediocrity like student performers at the Fringe.

HR used to be about an idle employee and his equally feckless human resources officer facing an appraisal from the jobsworths upstairs. I heard it briefly in this early incarnation and, even then, it reeked of actors killing time between jobs. I missed the middle series but now, at the start of the third, the original set-up seems to have been abandoned, presumably because the barrel of office-related gags has been well and truly scraped.

Now the same two colleagues appear to be retired and living together in a suburban semi (I'm still none the wiser as to whether they're in a relationship) though the title of the show, which points to an office setting, has curiously been retained. Nobody seems to care about this.

The plot, such as it was, concerned a lottery win, with Sam (Le Provost) refusing to tell Peter (Pryce) how much they had won lest it puncture their happiness and corrupt their souls. A man from the lottery (Tim McInnerny) appeared in the hope of filming the pair popping champagne corks and discussing their holiday plans but Sam wasn't playing ball. Thus, the rest of the episode was spent with Peter and the lottery man both trying to get their way. In between contrived setpieces you could just make out Pryce muttering "I have Tony Awards. I was in James bloody Bond" while Le Provost fired off furious letters to his agent. Someone put them out of their misery.

An essay in obsession came from James O'Neill in Odour, in which Tim McInnerny's high-handed cardiologist went to pieces as an unidentifiable smell seemed to follow him around. We were told it is a recognised condition (phantosmia) caused by brain seizures and other diseases but here seemed more of an obsessive-compulsive disorder triggered by guilt over his appalling treatment of a former lover and student. The author avoided having to write a denouement by getting his surgeon to throw himself off a roof. However, disappointment was avoided by McInnerny's intense depiction of a loathsome man who somehow located his own conscience.

The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff is stuffed with plot but gets away with it because that's one of the essential gags. As a spoof of the intricately engineered clockwork of a Dickens novel, full of sudden revelations and shock reversals, it could hardly be any other way. And in any case, it always takes care to have a joke on hand to lubricate every narrative turn. So, when Conceptiva Secret-Past and her daughter Victoria use Primly Tightclench's deportment volumes to bludgeon their way past the baddies you get a quick close-up of the titles they've picked: "How to Hurt a Large Man" and "Self Defence for Girls". I wasn't entirely sure about the first one-off special of Mark Evans's comedy at Christmas, but it's far easier to surrender to its silliness now that it's been sliced up into half-hour portions.

The cast is excellent, with Robert Webb relishing the possibilities for guileless credulity and Tim McInnerny chewing the carpet (in a splendid way) as the dastardly Harmswell Grimstone. At one point last night, he paused in the middle of a triumphant cackle as if something was missing, stroked his upper lip and said pensively: "I really must grow a moustache to twirl." I enjoyed the trial scene a lot too, in which Harmswell arrived understandably confident that he would prevail. The judge was called Harshmore Grimstone and he'd taken advantage of the immemorial right of every Englishman to be tried by a jury of his cousins.

The enjoyably affectionate Dickensian sitcom comes to an end tonight, and let's hope it's not the last we see of Robert Webb's good-natured Jedrington Secret-Past. Here Jedrington is brought back to sobriety by Servegood and reunited with his wife Conceptiva (Katherine Parkinson). And together they take the evil Harmswell Grimstone (Tim McInnerny) to court to demand the return of the business and their daughter.