Been watching the Wrong man(s). Very funny late at night ABC 2 half hour show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crkE7x_HFr0
Review in Fairfax:
A man witnesses a car crash. After the ambulance has left, he picks up a ringing phone from the road and answers it. A man tells him, "If you're not here by 5 o'clock, we will kill your wife".
And so the man is drawn into a Hitchcockian world of suspense and deadly danger, with no real idea what's going on. And it's all very funny. That's the premise of the grammatically inept The Wrong Mans (ABC1, 10.02pm), a comic suspense thriller in which the humour derives mostly from the ordinary man at the centre of extraordinary events being even more ordinary than most ordinary men are.
James Corden, who memorably teamed up with Ruth Jones to create the much-loved Gavin and Stacey, has found a new writing and acting partner in Mathew Baynton, and once again Corden has written himself into the role of one of life's losers.
As Phil, a 31-year-old mail boy who lives with his mother and spends his life organising fun events that nobody ever wants to attend, Corden is both the comedic engine of the show, and the excitable sidekick to Baynton's Sam, the leading man who wants nothing to do with the adventure that's dropped in his lap, but allows Phil's thirst for thrills to egg him on into the underworld.
......
If Corden's work with Gavin and Stacey was rooted firmly in the familiar and well-worn problems of human relationships, The Wrong Mans is a flight of fancy, throwing its characters into a mad maelstrom of a plot, like North By Northwest in miniature. It works mainly due to the chemistry between Corden's wannabe crime fighter and Baynton's reluctant hero, the one dreaming of glory and the other wishing he could just go home.
It goes to show how thin the line between comedy and drama can be: you could make a genuine thriller with an identical plot, just by making the two leads less silly. Thank goodness they didn't.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv- ... z2xgGr7Qw9
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman