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’.