By GREG DIXON
I'm not quite sure why, but I'll watch most anything featuring the gormless British actor Martin Clunes.
Perhaps it's that all-ears and rubber-lips face of his. It has only two settings - leering, or depressed yet hopeful - but both work rather well and bear repeat viewings.
It might be, too, that the hopeless adolescent in me still loves his seven-season stint in Men Behaving Badly, the early 90s sitcom about a couple of hopelessly adolescent men (the other was mostly played by Neil Morrissey) who drank a lot, weren't very bright and were a constantly biting irritation to their salty, smarter girlfriends - but this never stopped them behaving, well, very badly indeed.
Even Clunes' occasional dramatic turns (Goodbye, Mr Chips) have been worth the time.
All of which means that, in all likelihood, I will keep watching his new show William And Mary (8.35pm, TV One) even though last week's first episode of this ITV drama-comedy engendered much eye-rolling and groaning in my living room.
This five-part series (a second run has already been aired in Britain) has Clunes cast as divorced father William who meets midwife and divorced mother Mary (Julie Graham from At Home With The Braithwaites) through a dating agency.
He's a gloomy sort, who sings in a choir and plays bass in an R'n'B band. She's political, stroppy and quite possibly some sort of neo-hippie.
Neither have high hopes about finding someone through the agency, but Clunes has a jolt of love-at-first-sight carry-on when he sees and hears her video bio after what seemed only five minutes of looking for someone to date.
It was the first of the contrivances, although the major and most jarring was the revelation around which episode one was built.
On their first, fraught date, William did not reveal what he did - he was vague, evasive. A short time later, a client of Mary's died (of cancer) after giving birth and when Mary eventually arrived at the client's home to pass on her condolences to the husband (this was late because of a sub-plot involving backchatting a doctor and quack-midwife politics) William also turned up, as the undertaker called in to take the body away.
At which point - for reasons that were not clear, although may well become so - Mary gave William the most stern of stares. Sigh.
This she-brings-'em-into-the-world-he-takes-'em-out set-up is obviously intended to be comic in a sitcom sort of way.
But it also pushed William And Mary's otherwise rather gentle, even slightly whimsical, drama - and it is drama first - into the realms of the too-jacked-up-to-be-believed category.
Although Clunes and Graham deliver some nice work - the hangdog, sufferer-from-life schtick is perfect here - and the comedy, in fits and starts, works okay, the dramatic backbone is fatally weakened by this lamest of plot devices.
But, yes, I'll keep watching, although maybe not for long.
It's not that William And Mary (the title is maybe some vague reference to William of Orange and Mary II, who served as joint monarchs of England) is bad. It's just that, Clunes or not, it isn't very good.
A date with ol' rubber-lips
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