Can Douglas Is Cancelled hold its nerve?

Like many sitcoms, W1A featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in the world. Usually, of course, this merely goes to show how delusional the bloke is – but the subversive twist here was that Ian Fletcher, the BBC’s head of values, seemed to be right. Playing Ian, Hugh Bonneville therefore spent much of his screentime radiating a bemused dismay at the madness around him.

Now, as the main character in the comedy drama Douglas Is Cancelled, Bonneville is at it again. When we first met Douglas Bellowes, he’d just finished recording the latest Live at 6, a topical TV show that he presents in the traditional way: by looking avuncular 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’s been a tweet’. Disastrously, Douglas had been overheard at a family wedding telling ‘a sexist joke’. (Back in 2016, you may remember, Channel 4’s National Treasure needed rape accusations to bring down a much-loved presenter.)

So far the joke hasn’t been revealed, and Douglas claims to remember nothing about it – except that it definitely wasn’t sexist. Nonetheless, the bemused dismay soon kicked in, as he was assured by his agent Bently (Simon Russell Beale) and his newspaper editor wife Sheila (Alex Kingston) of the seriousness of the situation.

For his part, Toby commissioned a comedy writer to provide a wedding joke for Douglas to have told, displaying ‘the precise level of misogyny’ required: just sexist enough to explain the fuss on Twitter (the name X doesn’t seem to have caught on in TV dramas, either), but that would also ‘titillate’ 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 distinctly ambiguous message, ‘Don’t believe this. Not my co-presenter.’

At times, Steven Moffat’s script overdoes the exposition – not of the plot but of the issues. ‘Truth is only one side of the story,’ Toby told the somewhat implausibly naive Douglas. ‘Outrage is exciting and nuance is work,’ explained Sheila. Even so, the show offers plenty to enjoy: the starry cast; the fizzing, epigrammatic dialogue; and especially the exhilarating anger at the fact that we all know how nuts social media has become, but are powerless to do anything about it. Nobody actually wants to live in a world where no P or Q can go unminded. Yet when Toby says the Twitter attacks make him feel ‘like Michael Caine in Zulu’, he knows he must immediately add: ‘I wasn’t being racist by the way. I appreciate that Michael Caine is basically the aggressor.’

The programme also understands that the main division at work is not between the sexes, but between the generations, with Douglas and Sheila’s 19-year-old daughter a particularly poisonous example of unreasoning modern censoriousness. ‘It’s like we’ve lost her to a cult,’ lamented Douglas. ‘We’ve lost her to a university,’ replied Sheila. ‘It’s similar, but you still have to do their laundry.’

The only question now is whether the show will hold its nerve or whether Douglas will prove toxic and patriarchal after all. In recent years, there have been several shows that are clearly furious about how everybody is scared of Twitter, but all have ended up pulling their punches and blaming the usual suspects – presumably because they’re scared of Twitter. After such a promising start, it would be a real shame if Douglas Is Cancelled turned out to be another one.

Paul Whitehouse’s Sketch Show Years manages the rare feat of being simultaneously enthusiastic and half-hearted. The first episode of three began with the bullish assertion that ‘very little on television reveals as much about Britain as the sketch show’. It then promised a comprehensive history from the music hall onwards. And yet what followed was largely just a whisk through the most familiar of stuff: think of a high-speed train journey in which you catch glimpses through the window of Ronnie Barker buying fork ’andles or John Cleese complaining about a parrot.

Now and again, Whitehouse (appearing only in voice-over) did pause to praise say, the ‘timeless excellence’ of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and, more unexpectedly, ‘the peculiar genius’ of Benny Hill. Even then, though, we rather had to take his word for it, because the illustrative clips were often so short as to be meaningless if you didn’t know the sketches already.

Granted, it works as a perfectly pleasant blast of nostalgia. Still, after that opening promise, and given Whitehouse’s obvious and well-informed love of the subject, I kept wishing that instead of some brief notes towards a history of the sketch show, he’d given us the properly finished version.