The Mimic

A downbeat sitcom that plays out like a low-key indie film: the talented Terry Mynott is the gloriously named Martin Hurdle, an extremely lowly site maintenance worker at a pharmaceuticals firm who has very few friends or prospects, and a talent for celebrity impressions that forms his mental escape route. He may also have a long-lost son. Mynott was in The Morgana Show and VIP, where he worked with The Mimic writer Matt Morgan - but where those shows were brash and crass, this is the opposite.

This unassuming comedy may be a bit scattered and light on laughs, but there's something there. The tone is even more bittersweet and wistful tonight, as hero Martin regrets his missed opportunities and takes refuge once again in his celebrity voices (Schwarzenegger holding a leaf blower works well).

"Life happens. Time goes past," muses his old flame Dionne, mother of the 18-year-old son that Martin never knew he had. We get the feeling she's harbouring another bombshell, too.

Meanwhile, in another part of the plot, there's Neil Maskell as Martin's newsagent friend. Maskell was last seen as a terrifyingly low-key hitman in Utopia. He's just as good here in a wildly different sort of role and you can't help wishing we saw more of him.

Martin Hurdle continues to hide in plain sight in this week's second episode of the comedy drama, his vocal abilities employed to seduce a swimsuit model over the phone (as Christopher Walken), to socialise with strangers in a pub (as an Irishman) and to amuse his long-lost son (as Ian McKellen), whose mother he re-encounters tonight. Who the real Martin is, however, remains an engrossing mystery: unless his entire personality can be constructed from life's little disappointments, setbacks and missed opportunities.

The laughs come mostly from Terry Mynott's spot-on impressions or his deadbeat pal, Neil (Neil Maskell), who's considering dating someone he met online who has a chocolate lab, ('Some kind of Willy Wonka shit'). It's another beautifully judged blend of humour and pathos: one false step and it could be either dismal farce or Taxi Driver-esque alienation horror. No danger of either just yet, though: in Martin, Terry Mynott has created a tragicomic character it's impossible not to root for.

There's a lot that's very, very good about The Mimic, which stars the gifted impressionist Terry Mynott as lowly maintenance man Martin Hurdle.

It's the second episode tonight, but if you missed the first all you need to know is that Martin escapes his humdrum life by doing other people's voices - everyone from Alan Carr to Christopher Walken - and last week he discovered he has an 18-year-old son called Steven. Probably. We're still waiting for the results of the DNA test.

As a means of doing something more interesting with impressions than just going down the Dead Ringers route (or Very Important People, which was Mynott's last gig) this gets full marks for originality.

And the excellent supporting cast includes Ami Metcalf (last seen playing the young Kathy Burke in Walking And Talking) who plays colleague Chelsea, and Neil Maskell (fresh from playing Utopia's hit man) as a depressed newsagent whose foray into internet dating tonight is inspired.

But the mixture of occasionally crude humour and misty-eyed pathos is a tough one to pull off successfully. And that soundtrack is one dollop of syrup too far.

The Mimic review

It didn't quite work and yet bizarrely, I'm sort of willing it on, partly for its bravery, partly because a couple of the minor characters seem to have some potential, but also because if it added some more comedy to the mix it has the potential to be a bit more than the current sum of its parts.

Gigglebox weekly #79 - The Mimic

This week Channel 4 presented a slightly different take on impressionism, weaving it into a sitcom format.

Radio Times review

When I saw the premise for Channel 4's new comedy The Mimic, I was furious. It might banjax my long-nurtured plan to write a sitcom for Alistair McGowan, in which he plays a TV impressionist whose personal life is a disaster because of his inability to converse as himself. Scene one: Alistair resolutely embarks on his sixth marriage, but recites the vows in the voices of Peter Snow, Jim Bowen, and Orville. Later, the wedding night is ruined when Alistair does Dot Cotton in his new wife's ear.

Anyway, as it turns out The Mimic is sort of the opposite of that. Terry Mynott is the fabulously named Martin Hurdle, a gentle loser who has only one friend, a dowdy trouper called Jean (Jo Hartley), and no future prospects in his work maintaining the grounds of a faceless pharmaceutical firm. His secret, and his mental release valve, is that he's a brilliant impressionist.

The Mimic is by Russell Brand's old sidekick Matt Morgan, who worked with Mynott on The Morgana Show and VIP. Where they were crass and brash, this is slow, quiet and lovely. It has the vibe of an indie film, possibly one starring a big comedy name gambling their fame to prove they're human and can act.

Mynott has no fame to risk, yet there's still bravery in the way he makes Martin so uninhibitedly genuine and sad. In the first episode he was often filmed to accentuate his isolation. His little triumphs mostly weren't witnessed by anyone. He stopped doing his spot-on Alan Carr in the company car park when people walked into earshot, and his fantastic imagined conversation between Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones faltered when Jean asked who he was talking to and told him to get some sleep.

The Mimic[c/] is a bit more than a sitcom. You wonder not only whether it will still be funny next week and the week after, but also where it will go - what will happen to the hero. Is he a talented man waiting to be discovered or just a lonely man waiting to be loved?

Scenes where Martin met his previously unknown 18-year-old son, and where he took revenge on a bad HR manager by being him on the office tannoy, hinted that his achingly small world is about to expand. We'll be rooting for him to survive the change.

TV commissioners take note. Impressions aren't funny. The actual act of sounding like someone else is an impressive skill, especially if you can do more than one, but by themselves, impressions are not in the remotest bit amusing. Jon Culshaw may do a canny Tom Baker, but the mere act of sounding like Tom Baker is about as humorous as getting stuck in a lift. With Jon Culshaw.

So it was refreshing to see Terry Mynott bringing something very different to the TV impressions table in his rather bleak new sitcom The Mimic.

Dour, slow and not the cheeriest of concepts, The Mimic doesn't scream hit. The tale of maintenance man Martin Hurdle, who muddles through life with only his uncanny ability as a mimic to perk himself up, isn't a gag-fest. It ekes out jokes and woos you in with pathos and the likeable Mynott.

It wasn't the most sure-footed debut, but purely for bravery and trying something different, I'm willing to come back next week. Mynott could knock out 27 minutes of Terry Wogan and Ronnie Corbett impressions, but he's tested new waters here and his exploration of the mundane, outsiders and the ordinary showed brief glimmers of potential.

And the fact that he didn't just wheel out a Tom Baker impression means that I'm willing to give those glimmers a chance.

Partial though I'm not to the word "quirky", Channel 4's new midweek sitcom, The Mimic, made a special plea for it, perhaps along with "gentle" and also, at times, "funny". Here was Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott), a man with a dull job amusing himself by doing impressions. Wogan and Ronnie Corbett have become too standardised to impress but you had to laugh at his Al Pacino and his James Earl Jones quibbling with Morgan Freeman. The show didn't entirely depend on mimicry and there was strong support from Jo Hartley as his live-in friend Jean and Neil Maskell (arch psychopath from Utopia) turned up as a compellingly neurotic newsagent.

The first episode found an anxious Martin meeting up with an old flame's 18-year-old son for a burger followed by a DNA test. "If I'm not your dad, we can still be friends," he said. It was droll but unexpectedly touching. When it came back positive, I almost had to stop eating my biscuit.

The Mimic (Channel 4) is an odd little one. Impersonation on its own, as a form of comedy, has obviously had its day. But woven into a comedy drama series - about a bit of a nobody, who becomes somebody when he becomes somebody else, so to speak - hmm, that might kinda work.

I'm not laughing very much. And to be honest I don't always know who Terry Mynott's character is being when he's doing his impersonations (Morgan Freeman good, Ronnie Corbett less so). And the whole thing is really just a vehicle for his impressions. Nor do I really buy his loser image - he looks like someone who's charismatic and handsome trying to be less charismatic and handsome by doing something weird with his mouth.

But, in spite of all of the above, it's not entirely unlikable. In a funny kind of way. Worth another look, certainly.