Felix and Murdo

Armstrong and Miller, how could you? A few brief
laughs surrounded by a load of misses and
some spectacular bad taste. © Channel 4 2011

A disappointment. You can tell it’s not written by Armstrong and Miller themselves, but by Simon Nye – who, after writing the thoughtful Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice, should know better… but then I suppose he did create Men Behaving Badly. Whatever possessed the talented comic duo to throw their lot in with this show? The sets and lighting looked like a bad early 90s soap, the acting was hammy, the premise flimsy and the jokes swung between dull and bad taste. “Hey, I know what, we can have a reference to these two toffs attending Oxbridge, then show a flashback of them bumming in a bush! That’s the kind of insightful satire that Channel 4 really wants brought to a sitcom pilot set in 1908!” I won't even bother to cover the lame shreds of plot in summary form.

I got the briefest of laughs from a javelin-training montage in the middle that included a period recording of Eye of the Tiger, but that was about it. An otherwise interesting supporting cast including Pippa Haywood and Corey Johnson (yet another Doctor Who link, my does that series get around) was utterly wasted on the script and premise. It looks like Nye watched The Armstrong and Miller Show, felt like combining the (originally hilarious) street-talking Second World War fighter pilots with the improper Regency gentry sketches and whacked out this result over drinks.

Bland sight gags included an American with shiny white teeth, repeated throwing of javelins into people, framed crochet panels on the wall of offensive messages from the prospective in-laws and an intensely predictable sex tape of the duo’s Butler that was ‘accidentally’ shown after a home video. The bad taste ranged from the aforementioned bumming, to a cunnilingus joke that failed to make sense as a sentence and a paragraph of badly-aimed anachronistic sex references for all the things that Felix and his fiancé could do without actually having sex before their marriage. “Ooh, we can have these upper class Georgians talk about anal and pearl necklaces, aren’t we edgy!” No, Felix and Murdo, you’re a soggy sock.