Lacks the bite and bracing malevolence of Call My Agent!: Amazon’s Ten Percent reviewed

In theory, it should be a perfect match. John Morton – the man behind the brilliantly assured sitcom W1A which so gleefully skewered the BBC – gets to give us the English version of Call My Agent!: the brilliantly assured French lockdown hit which so gleefully skewered the Parisian showbusiness world. In practice, at least judging from the first two episodes, Ten Percent feels surprisingly uncertain of what kind of programme it wants to be.

At first, it looked as if we were in for a straight remake, using the same plots and characters and with the original cast replaced by British lookalikes (except, oddly, that the French agent who looked exactly like Roger Allam is played by Jack Davenport). As in the original, too, each episode features actors appearing as themselves, this time with the added advantage that we know who they are. What’s missing, though, is the glee – and with it much of the energy, bite and bracing malevolence.

This is most obvious in the celebrity cameos. Thanks to series like Extras, Episodes and The Trip, we’ve had plenty of memorable self-impersonations by the famous suggesting they’re nastier or more neurotic than we thought. Here, sad to say, they come across as thoroughly good eggs. In episode one, Kelly Macdonald was rejected from a Hollywood film for being too old: something that caused her French counterpart genuine anguish. The good-natured Kelly, however, took it pretty much in her stride. In episode two, Olivia Williams and Helena Bonham Carter’s sisterly affection wasn’t remotely affected when they were both cast in the same role.

A similar gloves-on approach applies to the agents themselves. Gone are the ruthless Gallic types prepared to fight properly dirty, and in their place come a bunch of people who only ever seem as if they’re acting tough – and not very convincingly at that.