TV review by Steve Bennett

Expectations are high when you have a cast of comedy nobility, led by Tim Key and Daisy May Cooper, and a script from the writers of Alan Partridge. Yet The Witchfinder can’t quite deliver on that promise, if not for a want of ambition.

Moving away from ‘Sidekick Simon’, Key takes a well-earned position centre stage as the title character, Gideon Bannister. Essentially he’s a 17th Century Partridge in a big hat: an awkward, pompous, venal man who takes on an ill-fitting mantle of authority, believing he demands respect when no one takes him seriously. Classic sitcom fodder, in other words.

Bannister is prone to weighty-sounding utterances, which he stands by when inevitably challenged by villagers, the local magistrate or his nemesis in the form of rival witch-finder Hebble, assuredly played by Daniel Rigby. He even has his own put-upon Lynn to bully, here in the form of Jessica Hynes’s Old Myers.

But the key dynamic is between him and Cooper’s suspected witch, the excellently named Thomasine Gooch. She very much plays to type as a plain-speaking woman unimpressed by the world, the polar opposite of the self-important, dissembling Bannister. For a mainstream TV comedy, the slow, dry humour that Key so adeptly personifies needs that counterbalance, although we don’t get nearly enough of it in the over-plotted first episode.

Rather than summarily finding Gooch guilty of sorcery, Bannister spots an opportunity to make his name by dragging her cross-country in the hope of grabbing the attention of Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins. So begins a typical mismatched partner road-trip that doesn’t really kick off until the second episode, a stronger offering as it makes more of the conflict and claustrophobic relationship between the two leads. And their enjoyable performances are bolstered by a panoply of cameos  across the series – Julian Barratt, Katy Wix, Reece Shearsmith and Allan Mustafa to name but four.

But the show depends too heavily on the innate comic instincts of its formidable cast than on a strong script. While there is an awkward wit to the writing of Neil and Rob Gibbons, the laughs tend to be stifled by the constant wry understatement. The Witchfinder hasn’t quite found the magic it seeks.

• The Witchfinder starts on BBC Two at 10pm tonight.

Review date: 8 Mar 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett