Will Douglas Is Cancelled be able to keep his cool?

Like many sitcoms, W1A featured a middle-aged man convinced he was the only sane person in the world. Usually this just goes to show how delusional the guy is, but the subversive twist here is that Ian Fletcher, the BBC’s head of values, seemed to be right. In his role, Hugh Bonneville therefore spent much of his screen time expressing amused dismay at the madness around him.

Now as the lead character in the comedy-drama Douglas is cancelledBonneville is at it again. When we first met Douglas Bellowes, he had just finished recording the latest Live at 6a current affairs TV show that he presents in the traditional way: posing as an uncle alongside an attractive female co-host who is at least 20 years his junior. But then came the chilling news from producer Toby (Ben Miles) that “there was a tweet”. Unfortunately, Douglas had been overheard at a family wedding telling “a sexist joke”. (In 2016, you may recall, the Channel 4 show National treasure (It took rape accusations to bring down a much-loved presenter.)

So far, the joke has not been revealed, and Douglas claims to remember nothing about it – except that it certainly wasn’t sexist. Nevertheless, bemused consternation quickly set in, as his agent Bently (Simon Russell Beale) and his wife Sheila (Alex Kingston), the newspaper’s editor, assured him of the seriousness of the situation.

For his part, Toby asked a writer to provide him with a wedding joke that Douglas could have told that displayed “the precise level of misogyny” required: just sexist enough to explain the Twitter furore (the X name doesn’t seem to have caught on in TV shows either), but that would also “tickle” his support base of “educated but marginally self-loathing housewives.” Meanwhile, co-host Madeline (Karen Gillan) may or may not have helped by retweeting the original tweet to her 2.3 million followers with the clearly ambiguous message: “Don’t believe this. Not my co-host.”

At times, Steven Moffat’s screenplay overdoes the exposition – not of the plot but of the stakes. “The truth is only one side of the story,” Toby told Douglas, somewhat implausibly naive. “Outrage is exciting and nuance is work,” Sheila explained. Despite this, the series offers many things to enjoy: the star-studded cast; the sparkling and epigrammatic dialogue; and above all the exhilarating anger at the fact that we all know how crazy social media has become, but we are powerless to do anything about it. No one really wants to live in a world where no P or Q can remain indifferent. Yet when Toby says the Twitter attacks make him feel “like Michael Caine in Zulu,” he knows he has to immediately add: “By the way, I wasn’t racist.” I like that Michael Caine is basically the aggressor.

The program also understands that the main divide at play is not between the sexes, but between the generations, with Douglas and Sheila’s 19-year-old daughter being a particularly toxic example of unreasoning modern censorship. “It’s like we lost her to a cult,” laments Douglas. “We lost it to a university,” Sheila replies. “It’s the same, but you still have to do their laundry. »

The only question now is whether the show will keep its cool or whether Douglas will turn out to be toxic and patriarchal after all. In recent years, several shows have been clearly furious about Twitter’s fear, but all have ended up pulling their punches and blaming the usual suspects – probably because they’re afraid of Twitter. After such a promising start, it would be a shame if Douglas is cancelled turned out to be another one.

Paul Whitehouse Sketch Show Years achieves the rare feat of being both enthusiastic and coy. The first of three episodes began with the optimistic assertion that “there are very few things on television that say as much about Britain as sketches.” It promised a complete story from the music hall. And yet what followed was largely a glimpse of the most familiar things: think of a high-speed train journey in which you glimpse Ronnie Barker buying forks or John Cleese complaining about a parrot through the window.

Occasionally, Whitehouse (who appears only in voiceover) stops to salute, for example, the “timeless excellence” of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and, more unexpectedly, “the peculiar genius » by Benny Hill. But even then we had to take his word for it, because the illustrative excerpts were often so short that they made no sense if you didn’t already know the sketches.

Certainly, it works as a perfectly pleasant burst of nostalgia. Yet after this opening promise, and given Whitehouse’s obvious and well-informed love of the subject, I continued to wish that instead of a few brief notes on the history of the sketch show , he gave us the correctly finished version.