Some guys have all the luck. Two years ago I was watching Stephen Merchant do short stand-up spots in grubby London clubs bemoaning his lack of success with women. A little later he went on tour with his first full live show, Hello Ladies. He got rave reviews and ended up doing the show in America where some HBO bods saw it and asked him to turn it into a sitcom. The TV version based on the comedic stage persona starts in the UK this week.
Of course this is not a wild punt from HBO. Merchant has a pretty good sitcom track record with The Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais. His first solo outing has various trademark elements of both of those shows, such as wince-making awkwardness, cringe-worthy embarrassment and some genuine laugh-out-loud physical humour, but it is also distinctive in its own right, putting Merchant centrestage at last.
Merchant plays Stuart Pritchard, a British web designer looking for love in Hollywood. Unfortunately despite having the confidence to talk to women he is pretty hopeless with them. In the opening episode he attempts to charm a woman in a club only to end up with most of the bar stock in his lap. Instead of spending the night with a supermodel he tends to spend it with a plate of chicken wings.
This is gentler than some of Merchant's previous oeuvre, but the same voice is there. Pritchard has the same thoughtless tightfistedness as the agent he played in Extras, asking his chums for petrol money when they go out for the night. The dynamic between Stuart and his female flatmate has something of the dynamic of Gervais and Ashley Jensen in Extras – platonic, but you sense there might be possibilities of something romantic bubbling away there. Ultimately there is a subtext of sadness and loneliness behind the bravado, which was there with David Brent too.
The script has some well-observed foot-in-mouth lines, but the best moments – apart from an aside in episode one describing condoms as "groin cloths" - are visual. When Stuart and his misfit chums pull up outside a club and try to make a swish entrance the car door painfully scrapes the pavement as it opens. Merchant makes full use of his lanky physicality as he has always done. One of the first times I saw him on TV was when he played a hospital cook in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Merchant already sticks out because he is 6 foot 7 inches, but in Darkplace he wore a chef's hat, which meant he had to duck every time he walked through a door – which the script made him do with dedicated regularity.
Hello Ladies is not groundbreaking television. It is not taboo-busting, controversial or edgy, but nor does it rely on Extras-style celebrity cameos, which could have been tempting given the setting. And it is exciting to see Merchant – not your usual leading man by any means – in a starring role. Stuart Pritchard might not be the player he thinks he is when it comes to women, but Merchant is certainly a player when it comes to writing TV comedy.
Hello Ladies is on Sky Atlantic on Wednesdays at 10pm.
