From Mainwaring to Alan Partridge: how to make the perfect sitcom loser

BBC One’s new Monday-night comedy hour was very much a game of two halves this week. At 9pm, the new sitcom Warren starred Martin Clunes as an irascible southern driving instructor who’d moved to the North and was struggling to fit in with the friendlier locals. At 9.30pm, This Time with Alan Partridge plopped Steve Coogan’s bumbling broadcaster onto the squishy sofa of a One Show-style magazine programme and watched the excruciating awkwardness unfold.

Neither series will win any awards for diversity, since their protagonists are that much-maligned 21st-century bogeyman: middle-aged, middle-class, suburban white males – both with a penchant for mid-range cars, beige leisurewear and petty feuds.

That’s where the similarities end. Warren was a widely panned flop. Partridge was a five-star triumph, garlanded with gushing rave reviews. So what went wrong in one case and right in the other?

Jimmy Donny Cosgrove and Paul McKenna, Warren’s creators, failed to grasp one of the fundamental tenets of British sitcom, which has a long and ignoble tradition of lovable losers. From Tony Hancock to David Brent, most of our classic comedies are built around fatally flawed anti-heroes. Yet they have to be written with wit, warmth and heart.

If so, we will laugh without failing to feel sympathy. We’ll wince as misfortunes are heaped upon them, secretly willing them to triumph but knowing deep down they never will. Like Harold Steptoe’s attempts to escape the rag-and-bone yard (and with it, his “dirty old man” father) or Basil Fawlty’s dreams of becoming a high-class hotelier, their aspirations are perennially thwarted.

If they do ever fulfil their ambition, our love often dissipates. We adored Delboy Trotter when he was a wheeler-dealing wide boy with the mantra: “This time next year, Rodders, we’ll be millionaires.” However, Only Fools and Horses was never the same once the Peckham brothers did strike it rich, courtesy of an antique watch found in their lock-up that sold for ￡6.2 million at Sotheby’s. It’s also why the sequel Going Straight wasn’t in the same league as Porridge.

So often, comedy is found in the gap between these characters’ inflated self-image and the harsh reality. Captain Mainwaring imagined himself a great military leader while struggling to control his inept Home Guard troop. David Brent prided himself on being the perfect boss when he was actually a fist-chewingly terrible one.

Yet we still rooted for both, as proved by our heartbreak when Brent was made redundant and our cheers when he finally stood up to his ghastly “great mate” Finchy. Wisely, creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant ended The Office there. We didn’t want to see a successful Brent any more than we wished to watch the Trotters living in mansions far from Nelson Mandela House.

However, Warren misunderstood the entire trope. Making your title character a hapless failure isn’t enough. Nor is making him a misanthrope. Impotent rage has long been a comedy staple – from Alf Garnett (was the choice of Warren’s name a sly nod to Warren Mitchell?) through to Rupert Rigsby, Reggie Perrin and Victor Meldrew – yet the audience needs to relate to the ranting.

Writers Cosgrove and McKenna made Warren a loser but forgot the lovable part. They don’t seem to much care for their thieving, fly-tipping bully, so why should we? Clunes is a popular TV presence with sitcom pedigree (see his Nineties hit Men Behaving Badly), but even he couldn’t save this unfunny mess.

Alan Partridge, by stark contrast, is one of comedy’s most enduring creations. So masterfully performed by Steve Coogan that it’s sometimes hard to discern where Coogan ends and Partridge begins, he’s been going strong for 28 years – spanning radio satire, spoof chat shows, docu-soap-style sitcoms, faux-travelogues, parody memoirs, even a feature film. This decade, Coogan’s co-writers have been twins Rob and Neil Gibbons, whose fresh ideas, laser-guided gags and deep affection for Alan have given the character a new lease of life.

It’s all very knowing and winkingly postmodern but, at its heart, Partridge is firmly in the lovable loser tradition. In Alan’s deluded mind, he’s a broadcasting heavyweight whose day has finally come. In reality, he’s more dingbat than Dimbleby: gaffe-prone, insecure and forever just out of his depth, like a panicked child on tiptoes in a swimming pool.

In the end, as it usually does, it comes down to the writing. Both Coogan and Clunes are fine performers. Whereas one was given a gold-standard script to work with by the Gibbons brothers, the other was saddled with tin-eared mediocrity.

The BBC’s Monday night comedy hour was left not as a double whammy of mirth but as a failure warming us up for the headline act.