Count Arthur Strong

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!

Steve Delaney interview

We meet the man behind the trilby-wearing variety entertainer and BBC Two star.

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.

Graham Linehan's fingerprints are all over this new sitcom, which he and Steve Delaney have co-adapted from the latter's radio show. It's a little more offbeat than Father Ted and The IT Crowd, but the storylines, which seamlessly build to dizzying heights of ridiculousness, are just as winning. This week, Count Arthur and Michael (the son of Arthur's one-time comedy partner) end up on the run in an ice-cream van, dressed in Victorian costume, after fraudulently operating incredibly misleading Jack the Ripper tours.

Opinion: In praise of BBC Two's Count Arthur Strong

Delaney has aged into the Count quite comfortably, no longer a hint of a young man in a silly wig.

I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the cricked neck and spilt Radox as, bath-bound, I crane my head towards the living room.

It wasn't bad. It was co-written by Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, which you would expect to have accorded it some comedy chops, and original creator Steve Delaney, who played the titular count, a pompous, bumbling malaprop-trap from Doncaster. The problem was this: it wasn't at all funny. There's recent history here, in the form of executives merely thinking a "name" is enough - in this case, Linehan; a couple of months ago, and in a far, far worse case of unfunny, Ben Elton - to create, as they probably say, albeit with knowing cynicism, comedy gold. In the end, it was just a something about a pompous bumbling man from Donny. Quite why it ever worked on radio I'm now struggling to understand.

Here's a thought. All generalisations are dangerous, even this one, but: few programmes migrate well from radio. There's Have I Got News For You, a spin-off from the (still extant, and wickeder than ever) News Quiz; and Tony Hancock's finest half-hours were actually on the screen. But executive shoes corridor-crunch on the ossified bodies of "hit" shows that died on the transition to screen. Just a Minute became just a dirge. Famously, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's... was a roiling trough of rhino poop. Not even that lovely Martin Freeman, in the marginally better movie, could pull it off, and the original TV series was a travesty. The phrase "Zaphod Beeblebrox had two heads" works fine-ish as a line in a book, or spoken on the radio (actually it wasn't that funny, ever) - when we can imagine it, in the bath, in the wonder of the mind's eye. On TV, some poor actor was actually given a kind of "ball of saggy painted calico, with eyes" to waggle on his shoulders as a second head. It's the difference between having to show it, and trusting the listener/reader to, basically, "insert image here": and, incidentally, the reason why Lucky Jim, the funniest book of the 20th century, has never been filmed, other than execrably. Surreality, wordplay and extended interior monologues would seem particularly vulnerable to becoming lost in transition: but I don't know quite why I'm banging on about things that don't work on TV, when there were so many last week that did. It's just that I... well, I quite liked lying in the bath. Imagining.

Count Arthur Strong, the award-winning jewel in BBC Radio 4's comedy crown, has moved to television, prompting much rejoicing and eager anticipation across the social networks. It would seem as though everybody loves the count. Except me, that is.

By some accident at birth or freak of nature I do not possess that part of the brain that finds the sitcom funny. Many are the times I have sat stony-faced in the pub while my mates have literally wiped away tears of laughter, having shared fond memories of the eponymous former variety artist's comic misadventures.

Any and all conversations I have ever had on the subject of Radio 4 comedy inevitably conclude with genius status bestowed upon writer, creator and performer Steve Delaney's bumbling, mumbling and malapropism-prone creation.

Being 'The One Who Doesn't Get It' is a distressing, disconcerting and unenviable position to be in. I can finally sympathise with my late father, whom I remember suffering apoplexies of rage and frustration whenever Monty Python's Flying Circus was on. "What," he would scream to nobody in particular, "is funny about that?".

However, I am pleased and relieved to say that I found quite a lot to enjoy in the count's television incarnation. I thought the set-up was clever, the supporting cast superb, the pace lively and several of the visual gags excellent, particularly the Heimlich manoeuvre that sent an elderly woman's false leg crashing to the floor.

I could even appreciate the skill in Delaney's performance, and identified a whole raft of subtleties I was formerly oblivious to. But I'm afraid the central character of Count Arthur is just too much of a twit for my tastes, provoking all-too familiar feelings of irritation rather than amusement.

But were you to ask anybody else who saw the show, I can almost certainly guarantee that they loved every minute. I'm sorry, Count Arthur, it's not you, it's me...