The Stage

TV Review

Published Friday 10 February 2006 at 12:40 by Harry Venning

Lewis was essentially an Inspector Morse episode without Inspector Morse in it. It looked liked a Morse, sounded like a Morse, was intelligently scripted like a Morse and was rich in all the superior production values that we all came to expect from a Morse.

But the more Lewis resembled an episode of Morse, the more the irritable, enigmatic old curmudgeon was missed, and John Thaw with him. The several references the new film made to Morse only served to reinforce his absence.

Not that Lewis was bad. It was a perfectly presentable and involving murder mystery that held the attention for its two-hour duration. It was certainly ten times better than all the episodes of Midsomer Murders combined. But it is against Inspector Morse that Lewis must be measured and it suffers in comparison.

The character of Lewis just isn’t interesting or exceptional enough to hold centre stage for so long. Though affable, engaging and brilliantly played by Kevin Whately, Lewis’ primary purpose in the earlier series was to provide contrast, playing the solid frame to Morse’s masterpiece. “I do the detection, you do the policing,” was how Morse once memorably dismissed his side-kick’s plodding qualities.

Lewis - The Spin Off acknowledged its central character’s limitations and worked hard to redress them. When we first meet Lewis, several years on from his old boss’ death, he is returning from secondment in Barbados, sporting the elevated rank of inspector, a floral shirt and a suntan.

En route to police HQ he takes a detour via a cemetery, where he lays lilies on a grave we assume to be Morse’s. In a clever twist, the headstone is revealed to be that of Lewis’ wife, killed two years earlier by a hit and run driver.

Bumping off Mrs Lewis is evidently intended to lend Lewis tragic status, with all its encumbent solitude, seriousness and melancholy - to make him more like Morse, in fact. That the tactic is only partially successful is possibly down to the fact that Mrs Lewis lived her entire life off-screen, like Mrs Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, so it’s hard to get too worked up about her passing.

Giving Lewis his very own sergeant also backfires slightly, with the new sidekick proving almost immediately more interesting than his boss.

Arrogant, abrasive and aloof, ‘Attaway’ Hathaway is a former theology student, seminary drop and Cambridge blue. In other words, the polar opposite of Lewis. Friction between the pair might well drive any subsequent series of Lewis, the likelihood of which seems almost inevitable given the 11 million viewers this single spin-off episode attracted.

For the record, Lewis’ first case concerned a deranged mathematician prepared to murder in order to protect his pet theorem and academic reputation. The body count was a modest three, in stark contrast to Morse, a series of which usually left Oxford looking like the Cambodian killing fields.

The sitcom is dead, long live the sitcom, pronounced Alan Yentob, presenter of arts show Imagine. Sitcom, he argued, has evolved from the traditional script-based format, dependent upon jokes, to a more improvisational form, based upon the skills of the actors involved. A disturbing thought, given that so many actors’ skills don’t even stretch to acting, let alone improvisation.

Mercifully Yentob didn’t give us yet another set text lecture on the history of sitcom - the sixties’ social realism, the seventies’ middle-class complacency, the eighties’ alternative influences, etc - but spoke directly to the stars and creators of recent sitcom successes.

Those representing the more informal, but no less arduous improvisational approach were Armando Iannucci and Chris Langham from the breathtakingly brilliant The Thick of It, the ubiquitous Merchant and Gervais of The Office and Extras fame and the Peep Show boys.

Representing the proud heritage of studio-based, plot-driven, script-based sitcom were My Family, BBC’s perennial ratings winner, and Channel 4’s latest comic offering The IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd is set deep in the bowels of an office block, home to Maurice (Richard Ayoade) and Roy (Chris O’Dowd) the socially-inept, sexually-inadequate computer boffins who comprise the company IT team. Their comfortable, if shambolic world is turned upside down when Jen (Catherine Jenkinson), an attractive but computer-illiterate woman, is promoted over them and made their boss.

Graham Linehan’s comedy is broad, frantic and farcical but it does deliver frequent laughs. Even after an introductory double bill I’m still not convinced that the central characters are fun or original enough to carry a series, but there’s every chance The IT Crowd may yet prove a slow-burning success.

DETAILS

Lewis - ITV, Saturday, January 29, 9pm

Imagine… - BBC1, Tuesday, January 31, 10.45pm

The IT Crowd - Channel 4, Friday, February 3, 9pm