TV review by Steve Bennett

The death of Rik Mayall was a huge loss to comedy – and especially to Man Down. The wild slapstick stunts he played on Greg Davies’s character, Dan, were the highlight of every episode in series one. So could the series survive without him?

The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, it’s possibly even better. In the first run, Mayall could be a ‘get out of jail free’ card – a guaranteed hilarious, random scene to be dropped in whenever needed. Now with the main characters must shoulder all the funny without such a crutch and they’ve developed – as they should in a second season – to be more than up to the task.

Davies, who created the series, continues to be beautifully humiliated by life, his alter-ego being a sort of proto-Victor Meldrew outraged at the indignities middle-age is heaping upon him. He describes himself as looking ‘like an inbred toddler has picked the pastry off a pork pie and squeezed the meat into what he thinks is the shape of a man’ and gets short shrift from doctors, gym instructors and bouncers all keen to remind him of his decay.

Mid-life crises and desperate attempts to impress the girl are both storylines that have powered more than enough classic sitcom plots, and Davies makes the most of both here. His attempts to act young lead him to dye his hair ‘like an 1980s snooker player’ and squeeze that substantial girth into a Shed Seven T-shirt three sizes too small before hitting a nightclub he’s not built for. His humiliation is gross, but so gloriously over-the-top that it works. And the script is so tightly, intricately plotted that it’s almost inevitable – it’s a masterclass in sitcom construction.

This strong central character is backed by an even more bizarre assembly of nutcases. Even Davies’s erstwhile We Are Klang co-star Marek Larwood, always one for the biggest of comedy, doesn’t stand out in this episode, in which he cameos as a very particular restaurateur.

Stephanie Cole – stepping into the dotty senior role vacated by Mayall as she did in the last Christmas special – is gloriously mad, and Roisin Conaty is clearly in her own world… though a little underused in this episode, in which her character Jo tried to build up her CV by doing ‘stealth’ jobs. The glorious, bitchy sniping between Dan and the children he teaches was also underplayed this episode, with the class dispatched on a field trip for the duration.

Finally Mike Wozniak, as Brian, is supposedly the normal one of the friends,but his very normalcy becomes a nice running joke. After researching his family tree and discovering he comes from working-class stock, he sighs wistfully: ‘I thought I’d come back from a long line of financial advisers…’

All things considered, this is a sterling return for one of Channel 4’s best new comedies.

Review date: 1 Jun 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett