Some things belong on radio. Although I'm sure the BBC would love to have the pictures back to go with Test Match Special, they might find they don't have space for them any more or else we would lose any number of programmes about moving house or buying up other people's old tat at auction.
But the announcement that Count Arthur Strong was to go on the telly was immediately met with doubt and suspicion. It is script-based, works well on radio, and seeing it might not offer up much more. It might even reduce it.
After only two episodes, those doubts are confirmed for the most part. It looks as if the radio shows have been re-worked into a new scenario in which someone played by Rory Kinnear is researching a book about his father who knew the raconteur and pompous old ham in the olden days. Count Arthur is an update on the confused 60's comedy icon, Harry Worth, with added baroque malapropism and frustrated self-regard. The second episode took a long time to develop an unlikely set of meetings between Rory's character and someone in a shop until recreating a Victorian Jack the Ripper scene as he pursues him down a street shrouded in fog but whether the added visual facility justified the eventual effect was a moot point.
For someone who I last saw in the flesh, most tragically Shakespeherean, as it were, and who has since enhanced his actorliness and credentiality elsewhere, Rory looks a bit embarrassed in some laboured passages here where the same joke has been made better in other places and more economically, even in ordinary daily life not thought worthy of writing down, rehearsal and filming. There are still some fine moments of Count Arthur carried forward from the original conception of him but whether it is worth wading through an otherwise no more than workmanlike script to get to them is a judgement still very much in the balance.
There is still time for the TV version to work but it has somehow been devalued and the genius of it diluted in the process. It's a shame things can't be let be as what they are but need to be exploited until inevitably at some stage the impetus runs out and they stop being what they were..
