Fans of Rob Brydon are likely to already be familiar with his character "Keith Barret" from the successful BBC TV series 'Marrion and Geoff', and it's prequel 'A Small Summer Party'.  For those who are unfamiliar with Brydon's sublime brand of comedy understatement, let's recap for a moment.   In the series "Marrion and Geoff" we saw Keith thrown into turmoil by his wife, who took his two children and left to live with her colleague Geoff.  We saw Keith striving to come to terms with this solely through a fly-on-the-wall-documentary style camera attached to the dashboard of his car.  In the resultant monologue Brydon played a character who, while visibly melancholy, glossed everything he encountered in a positive spin, which in reality looked to everyone but himself like the throws denial and the verge of a nervous breakdown.  This was dark humour.  But more than that it was humour that excelled at subtlety more than any other recent offering in this genre.

At this point I should point out that Brydon has been closely associated with Steve Coogan over the years, both in writing and production, and of course there are similarities between the styles of humour of Brydon and Coogan (in particular with Alan Partridge).  However, it seems now almost a custom that whenever one mentions Brydon one also has to talk about Coogan. So for a change we decided that we wouldn't talk about Steve Coogan at all in this review.  Then we realised it was much easier to write this review if we did.  So I will.

However, where Alan Partridge is undeniably a character who is also presented in a very dark and subtle style of humour, he almost appears overstated when compared to Brydon's performance as Keith Barrat.  This really is a case of less equals more.  There have been numerous occasions when watching Brydon when I have thought "If I was writing that character in that situation I would have done this or that differently, or could have developed a situation further with that character with a more obviously funny conclusion".  But that would have been missing the point.  This isn't comedy about over-exaggerated personas and caricatures of cultural stereotypes.  It is in fact the ability of Brydon to draw an emotionally believable character in Keith Barret that make this black humour work.

So that's the character.  But it is the setting for this new series that may surprise some viewers.  In this new series, gone is the documentary style, the monologues and the 'bug-eye' dashboard camera.  Instead Keith Barret has now been given his own chat show.  (it's may seem that we're drifting back into Alan Partridge territory here, but bear with me, I can assure you there are no "Ah-Ha's".)

Keith has indeed been given his own chat show to host, in which he gets on various celebrity guests to discuss relationships.  In the first episode he has Richard & Judy on the sofa, to probe about the details of their marriage.  Now, this is not craftily constructed gaffs (as in Alan Partridge), nor is it simply putting celebrities on the spot to watch them squirm or to embarrass them (as in Ali G).  Instead this is something far more freeform.  It's not scripted, it is simply Brydon responding in character to the discussions, and it works very well.  It could be described as character comedy in one of it's purest forms, whereby the character alone is enough to sustain a strong vein of humour throughout, without the need to construct verbal "pratt-falls" or obvious laughter points.

The chat is interspersed with segments recorded by Keith on the subject of relationships, such as expert advice or speed-dating sessions, and these really help to place the character against a backdrop of ineptitude with women, something which is required for the chat show sequences to be at their best.

A significant part of the comedy here can be found in Keith's lack of experience and ability as a television front man.  Unlike Partridge who is written to believe he is a great television personality, Keith comes across as the opposite:  he's not really sure why he's there.  Some great examples of this ineptitude can be seen in the way he "hands back to himself in the studio" after one of the pre-recorded cut-away segments, or his inability to move seamlessly around the studio during a segment where the audience can question the guests, managing a kind of bumbling awkwardness that one never saw on Kilroy.

So what we have here is a show that really appears to be greater than the some of it's parts.  On paper it wouldn't look like anything special.  If it was handed to you in script format, I would venture that it wouldn't appear to even be particularly entertaining.  Yet towards the end of the show I was laughing so hard that my sides physically hurt, and it's been a while since I've been able to say that about a new TV show.  My only concern with this series is that it may be too subtle to have real mainstream mass-market appeal.  But I hope I'm wrong.  I hope this show is appreciated as a great example of current British television comedy at it's best, and maybe, just maybe, Coogan can stand in Brydon's shadow instead for a little while.