Vincent Franklin

The Witchfinder, BBC Two, review

Tim Key and Daisy May Cooper are magic.

Decline And Fall review

Imagine such a bygone world where someone would get a job they are ill-suited for, simply because they are posh. How foolish! Still, it will be interesting to see how George Osborne's London Evening Standard reviews the new BBC One adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's stinging social satire Decline And Fall.

There are surprises, though less charm, in new comedy from Channel 4's Bugsplat!, from Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered writer Guy Jenkin. Bugsplat! is set on an English RAF base, where drone pilots coordinate attacks on far-away targets. The press of one big red button in a converted shipping container in a field annihilates enemies and any number of innocent "collaterals". This brutal premise forms the basis of George Brant's fierce monologue Grounded, which is currently running off-Broadway with Anne Hathaway as its drone pilot. But the treatment here is more daft than harrowing, reaching for dark humour in the fundamental absurdity of the situation. That is not, in itself, offensive, though the jokes never quite land, hovering uncomfortably between trying to be both cautious and outrageous.

In its opening scene, a target vehicle is tracked by a drone as it moves from wilderness to town to marketplace to an orphanage for blind children, the collateral damage of any attack becoming increasingly unacceptable. "It'd kill 50 children!" one observer objects. "Health and safety gone mad," grumbles splat-hungry pilot Lexi (a caustic Lauren O'Neil), as she hovers over the button. Eventually, she gets to press it. She celebrates with a drink - they've taken out the bad guy. Only they haven't, and the real bad guy tricked them, and WikiLeaks is all over it and what appeared to be an operational triumph quickly turns into a PR disaster, particularly since someone filmed them dithering over the approach.

Vincent Franklin, last seen in Russell T Davies's Cucumber, plays exasperated Wing Commander Barry, who tries his best to manage this messy cross between a bureaucratic nightmare and "Xbox shit". But for a modern sitcom dealing with such current subjects, it feels strangely old-fashioned. Were it not for the subject matter, it is easy to imagine it airing on ITV's 9pm Friday-night spot. There are touches of wit - I enjoyed the use of "to decease" as a verb - but the obvious problem is that the real situation is so tragic and absurd that it requires razor-sharp satire to slice it open. The Thick of It, which is a clear point of comparison, worked because its writing was ruthless. This doesn't go far enough. When Fiona Button's PR manager Gina attempts to take control of the disaster - "What's a cock-up but a triumph that hasn't been spun right?" - you're left wishing Malcolm Tucker would come and show them how it's all done.

A strange solo outing for Guy Jenkin, co-writer of Ballot Monkeys. On an RAF base in the British countryside, a squadron who used to fly bombers in Afghanistan now sit controlling drones. In this, er, pilot episode, a hit on a high-profile jihadi turns bad, and it all goes a bit Thick of It as the details leak out. Can comedy flow from such a dark and airless subject? Vincent Franklin, Rufus Jones and a particularly fine Hugh Skinner - a dashing toff here, instead of his dim one in W1A - lead what proves to be a hopeless mission.

Radio Times review

A great cast - Vincent Franklin from Cucumber, Hugh Skinner (dumb Will in W1A), and Rufus Jones (camp David, also in W1A) do their best in this queasy sitcom about drone pilots.

The bored little group are closeted in a cabin on a bleak airfield, their days characterised by long stretches of yawning boredom punctuated by administering sudden death in the Middle East, and sometimes they get it wrong.

It's a black comedy (there's a very off-colour gag about social services) but it's not black enough and consequently not funny enough. It's the kind of thing Charlie Brooker would do ruthlessly well, yet writer Guy Jenkin (Ballot Monkeys and Drop the Dead Donkey) lets it drift into farce.

This new comedy drama written by and starring James Corden and Horrible Histories' Mathew Baynton is quite good. What's remarkable is the wealth of on-screen talent involved, and I don't just mean Dawn French, Rebecca Front, Nick Moran, Homeland's David Harewood and Him & Her's Sarah Solemani. When you can employ Paul Higgins (The Thick of It) and Twenty Twelve's Vincent Franklin in the seemingly throwaway roles of traffic cops, then that is casting in depth. Taking its title from Hitchcock's 1956 thriller of mistaken identity, The Wrong Man, it stars Baynton as a Berkshire County Council office drudge accidentally mixed up in a criminal conspiracy. Corden is on his best form as his excitable colleague.

The first episode of the new series features one shocking absence - Malcolm Tucker languishes in opposition and is nowhere to be seen as yet - and of hints that the compromises of coalition are an open goal to for satirists. A botched schools policy dominates the opening episode. It's the brainchild of the Coalition's junior partners but - at the behest of fearsomely irritating spin doctor Stewart Pearson (Vincent Franklin) - it's launched by Roger Allam's crusty traditionalist Peter Mannion, who palpably neither knows nor cares about the initiative. Before long, Mannion's taken his daily 'gaffe dump' and is branded a 'fibre-optic Fagin' - could the government really be proposing the idea of getting kids to design apps to pay for their higher education? As you may have gathered, many of the names remain the same, they're just on different sides of the government/opposition equation. But some things never change. Still bumbling along in the background - hilarious, admirable, pitiful - are civil servants Glenn Cullen (James Smith) and Terri Coverley (Joanna Scanlan). Terri wants out but she's 'too expensive to get rid of.' Glenn is sadder still - when his new colleagues aren't ignoring him completely, they're comparing him to 'a week-old party balloon.' Yet does Glen hold the key to the show's essence? Glenn loses every battle he fights...

Video: Vincent Franklin on Steve Hilton PR guru

Vincent Franklin who plays PR guru Stewart Pearson in the political satire The Thick Of It said lawyers allowed him to say: "I am a little bit like Steve Hilton".

The actor's role has been linked to David Cameron's outgoing PR guru, and he described filming scenes in Westminster for the political satire, which also returns with a new coalition government mirroring real political events.

Armando Iannucci's political satire returns for its fourth series - the first since Labour was ousted from government - and the good news is that it's still brilliant. The MPs, advisers and civil servants of the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship are now working for a coalition government yet, unsurprisingly, are no more effective at their jobs. The department has created a new digital project aimed at teenagers but spin doctor Stewart Pearson (Vincent Franklin) decides that it should be launched by the Secretary of State (Roger Allam) - a man who has not only had no involvement in its development but is also digitally illiterate. Sadly it's a Peter Capaldi-free episode but he returns next week.