It’s because Corden is such a dick that The Wrong Mans was so blindingly brilliant

God, it must be awful to have been at school with James Corden. As he sat fatly at the back of the class farting and flicking bogies and distracting the teacher with his relentless smartarsery, you’ll have consoled yourself with the happy thought that at least this repellent, maddeningly irritating waster was never going to make anything of his life…

Then, years later, you’ll have opened the papers to read rave reviews of his hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey. A fluke, you’ll have thought, till you saw the similarly impressive notices of his West End triumph One Man, Two Guvnors. And any schadenfreude you might have experienced over the recent panning of his dismal Christmas appearance in Esio Trot will have been cruelly dissipated by the news of his £1.5-million role hosting The Late Late Show on CBS and by the extravagant plaudits for his other Christmas venture The Wrong Mans (BBC2).

But it’s precisely because Corden is so infuriating that The Wrong Mans was so blindingly brilliant. Its premise, essentially, was this: imagine what would happen if an incredibly annoying, relentlessly puerile loser fantasist — Corden playing (almost) himself — suddenly found himself immersed in a high-octane thriller plot so bloody and convoluted it made James Bond look like The Vicar of Dibley. Like the first series, it really shouldn’t have worked but it did, spectacularly.

What it had — a bit like Corden’s character Phil Bourne, a Walter Mitty-ish post-room boy at Bracknell city council — was absolute conviction: in its script, in its impossible, yet weirdly credible storyline, in its performances (with the serious characters playing it absolutely dead straight, as a foil to the relentless ineptitude of Bourne and his hapless sidekick Sam Pinkett), and in its clearly generous budget, with location sequences all the way from Bracknell to Texas, as well as a tandem parachute jump from a light aircraft, which I’m pretty sure only happened because it was something the two co-stars had always rather fancied doing and it was a clever way of putting it on expenses….