This good-natured comedy is just the tonic we need
Have your television needs changed in these uncertain times? Plenty of people will tell you this is your opportunity to get your teeth into that box set of Narcos or Succession, but I find myself craving something gentler. Something so undemanding that I could watch it while doing something else, like scrolling through my phone for news of the apocalypse, and still understand it perfectly. Welcome to my life, Mister Winner
(BBC Two). This is a comedy that I might not have given a second glance, pre-crisis. Now, I fall on it with the level of gratitude I would otherwise reserve for an Ocado delivery slot.
Spencer Jones plays the ironicallynamed Leslie Winner, a sweet-natured sort of chap who retains an optimistic outlook despite his life being a succession of small disasters. In this first episode, he found himself stuck in a lift wearing just his underpants and covered in acupuncture needles, after his session was interrupted by a fire alarm; pushed a pianola through a town centre; and bagged a job in a restaurant by pretending that he was a trained pianist, only for the pianola to go haywire mid-performance. Mister Winner is Mr Bean with social embarrassment and no laugh track.
All the situations could be resolved quite easily, but aren’t. Winner could have pulled out the acupuncture needles and put on some trousers. He could have told a restaurant customer who requested My Girl by The Temptations that he didn’t know how to play that one, but instead he programmed the title into the pianola and ended up with My Girl by Madness. The punchlines are visible from space and I can’t reproduce any of the jokes here because the script isn’t particularly funny. Jones isn’t even, really, a master of physical comedy. But he imbues the whole thing with a low-key charm.
Besides, Winner isn’t a total loser, because he has a fiancée (Lucy Pearman) who loves him despite his klutziness. His future father-in-law is also his boss (Shaun Williamson, aka Barry from Eastenders) who is never more than slightly exasperated with him regardless of what he does. There is no meanness in the programme whatsoever; as a portrait of a man in awkward situations, it’s more Frank Spencer than Larry David.
The pilot for this show was broadcast way back in 2017 and the series was commissioned long before the current news cycle. But it feels just right for now, as a little respite from the real world. T he joke in Hitmen (Sky One) is that the hitmen are played by Mel and Sue. And I don’t mean simply that the actors cast in the roles are the comedians and presenters Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, the former hosts of The Great British Bake Off.i mean that this new sitcom features the exact same Mel and Sue double act that has become so familiar to us over the years. The same delivery, the same comic timing, the same dynamic of Mel being the slightly sweeter, dimmer one and Sue being the slightly cooler, cleverer one. Remember those little skits they used to do at the beginning of Bake Off, in the gardens outside the tent? Every episode of Hitmen is that, stretched to half an hour, but ending with them shooting someone in the head.
So they are slightly reluctant, very English contract killers who behave as if they’re working in a regular office job. In the first episode, Jamie (Giedroyc) and Fran (Perkins) sat in the front of their van and discussed Fran’s birthday. All the while, a corrupt lawyer (Jason Watkins) was sitting in the back, tied up and with a bag over his head. The three of them ended up wearing party hats and playing charades, stopping off at Mcdonalds and trying to order their soon-to-bemurdered charge a Mcflurry. In the second episode, they sat and nattered about their relationship problems while a corrupt accountant (Sian Clifford, who I hope isn’t getting typecast as “furious woman supporting character” after her excellent performance in Fleabag) was tied up behind them.
The banality of it all is mildly amusing – Fran trying to invite an ex to her birthday party while Jamie is in the same shot, bundling a dismembered corpse into the canal; looking up torture methods on their mobile phone and concluding that they look more like tantric sex positions. The premise of the show isn’t bad and it might have worked with someone else. I bow to no one in my love for Mel and Sue on Bake Off and as presenters – both together and apart – they’re great. But they’re not actors, and this project should have been quietly dispatched before it hit the screen. Mister Winner ★★★ Hitmen ★★