The Mimic

The Mimic, Channel 4, review

The Mimic (Channel 4) is a new sitcom with Terry Mynott playing a dull man, Martin Hurdle, a lowly maintenance operative who is also a brilliant impressionist. Terry Mynott is good at both halves. His dullness is like Julian Barratt's in The Mighty Boosh: understated and unattractive. He smiles like the horse in Picasso's Guernica.

New Channel 4 comedy The Mimic appears to have been built around the ability of its lead actor, Terry Mynott, to do impressions and there are moments when you wonder whether he provides a solid enough foundation. His Terry Wogan was very wobbly and his David Attenborough was a weird hybrid of Alan Bennett and Ian McKellen. Other impressions are so left-field they have to be visually signposted or cued up by a line of dialogue to make sure we get them.

But there was a promising little sequence as Martin (Mynott's character) sat slumped in front of his television and Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones fought it out over who was best at adding gravitas to a natural-history programme. It's a comedy of underachievement essentially, complete with marimba noodling on the soundtrack to signal the underlying pathos, but it has some lovely downbeat moments and funny silences where some comedies might strive (unsuccessfully) for a big guffaw. Look out for Jo Hartley as Martin's friend Jean too. She's very good, so quietly you might miss it.

The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.

Martin Hurdle - even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical company. There is no hope of promotion from whitewashing graffiti off walls, so he disappears into a multi-coloured vocal hinterland where he can be any number of camp television presenters or, in the sharpest sequence, James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman engaging in a Socratic squabble over who has the better Afro-American larynx for narrating documentaries about penguins.

This ability has not brought Martin any more joy away from work. He lives with Jean (Jo Hartley), a female flatmate who is equally propping up the bar at midlife's last-chance saloon. For all the richness of Martin's interior life set against his humdrum routine, The Mimic could easily struggle to escape its binary parameters, but this first episode swiftly introduced a second outlandish scenario: Martin has discovered that he may have fathered a child 18 years earlier. It's all subject to a DNA test, but when they meet in a pub, the boy is soon crossing his fingers that they won't be related after all. This is a worry Martin articulates to himself through the conduit of Wedding Crashers. "If I didn't know who this guy was, and it turned out to be this guy," says Vince Vaughn, " I would be pretty disappointed." Or was it Owen Wilson?

It'll be worth finding out where The Mimic, already promisingly weird, goes from here. A lot rests on how series creator Matt Morgan marries two distinctly left-field scenarios - incurable impersonator discovers he's sired an adult. It certainly revinvents a branch of entertainment that has felt for a while like a busted flush.

TV Review: The Mimic (Channel 4)

Admittedly it's still early days, so I don't want to write-off The Mimic too soon. The brief trailer for episode 2 was funnier than this opening half-hour, and maybe the dramatic elements of the series will rapidly improve.

Review: The Mimic

The Mimic could become something of a surprise classic.

The Mimic review

The Mimic is definitely a slow burner and, if I'm honest, my faith in Terry Mynott's capabilities made me persevere as, other than a few scenes referring to the protagonist's possible fatherhood, this debut episode seemed to lack a plot somewhat.

There's a reason there aren't too many sitcoms about impressionists, and The Mimic - at least this first slightly underwhelming episode - shows why. Very Important People's Terry Mynott plays a deadbeat maintenance man with a paternity test coming up. He also has a gift for mimicry. As a result, plot becomes a bit secondary while we wait for the next impression (everyone from Wogan to Walken) to be crowbarred into the narrative at the slightest excuse. The good news is, it gets better and funnier over the course of the series.

Terry Mynott: Being school 'thicko' made me funnyman

Mimic Terry Mynott has revealed he does voiceover work for David Attenborough on his award-winning shows - despite struggling to read.

Impressionist Terry Mynott, last seen in Very Important People, stars as stuck-in-a-rut odd-jobs man Martin in this downbeat comedy drama. Whenever things look bleak, Martin's escape valve is to air his thoughts through other people's voices. From Terry Wogan to Morgan Freeman, anybody's voice is preferable to his own - until an old flame gives him pause for thought, claiming he's the father of her 18-year-old son. Can mimicry help him handle that one?

For a sitcom, this is at the loose, gentle end of the spectrum. There aren't many out-and-out gags, it's filmed on location, there's no laughter track - if it were an hour long, you'd call it a comedy drama.

Our sort-of-hero is Martin (Terry Mynott), who has a dead-end job doing site maintenance for a drugs company (called, cheekily, CelPharm). When we meet Martin, he's in a traffic jam, amusing himself with a scabrous impression of Terry Wogan ("It's mornings like this, I wish I was back in Phuket bouncing a ladyboy on each knee...") and we soon gather that this is Martin's Walter Mitty-style escape.

He may be a man adrift, but his impression of Morgan Freeman arguing with James Earl Jones is uncanny (his Ronnie Corbett less so). What threatens to shake up Martin's world is learning he may have a son he has never met. That's if the DNA test pans out...