It is no accident the biggest wally Steve Coogan ever created was a broadcaster. For towering vanity and endless neediness, Alan Partridge takes some beating. The Douglas in Douglas is Cancelled (ITV1, Thursday) is willing to try, but given lovely Hugh “Downton/W1A/Paddington” Bonneville plays the character there is a limit on how much of a monster he can be.
Douglas is not a bad person, you see, he’s just a chap of a certain age who is bewildered by all this talk of wokeness, or what they used to call in his day, political correctness. He can’t make head or tale of it, but he knows it is a bad thing to enrage the social media gods. Now a sexist joke he might have told at a wedding has gone viral with the help of his Live at Six co-presenter Madeline (Karen Gillan).
Before you can say “Richard Madeley”, Douglas is on his way to being cancelled. Created and written by Stevan Moffat (Doctor Who, Sherlock), Douglas is Cancelled is more of a comedy-drama about journalism than it is a sitcom about wokeness. The wokeness stuff is the weaker part of the package, coming across as slightly dated.
Outside of the usual suspects, does anyone still rail about “micro-aggressions” and pronouns? The show is at its best when the A-team cast is given free rein to be odious meeja types, as seen in Drop the Dead Donkey and W1A. Alex Kingston as a newspaper editor, Simon Russell Beale as Douglas’s slippery agent, Bonneville and Gillan (terrific) as the archetypal spring/autumn p.
