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Mister Winner is so-called as Leslie Winner (Spencer Jones) sets out the bog-standard premise of him wanting to propose to his girlfriend, Jemma (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), while she wants to dump him because he prats about too much and isn’t at all serious.
The billing for this set up Mister Winner as “hapless but loveable”, a “well-meaning man who is prone to accidents” and “lands himself in unusual and often somewhat dangerous situations”, making him sound like the new Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, but without any of the charm, or comic timing, or the set-ups, or the writing, or the performances, or anything in that sitcom which made me laugh like a drain. Or laugh much at all.
What stuck in my mind about this was a lot of very poor writing, such as how this jobless prat claimed he was setting up his own business empire in his shed… once he gets his business loan… and the shed… which he’ll buy with the loan.
Throw in some dire jokes, namely using train tickets to be pretend white teeth, buying an over-extended selfie stick which got caught up in trees as they were on a bus, and booking a house on AirBNB, only to find the owner, Ajay (Romesh Ranganathan) hasn’t actually gone away, as well as the place being a tip.
Plus, cue in a movie reference within a shark tank, where part of a sign fell to the tank floor, in the same way an arm did in Jaws.
Oh, two things did come across the same way as the aforementioned Michael Crawford sitcom – every time Leslie does something stupid, the tertiary characters all around him look embarrassed to be there. Plus, Ms Edwards almost sounded like Michele Dotrice late on.
With one or two minor chuckles, at least Mr Winner wasn’t a painful experience like last week’s Tim Vine Travels In Time, but in any event, Mister Winner is a big loser of a show in my eyes.
Mister Winner isn’t available to pre-order on DVD and is unlikely to be. If you missed it, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
Score: 2/10
Director: Ben Palmer
Producer: Michelle Farr
Writer: Matt Morgan
Cast:
Jemma Smith: Aimee-Ffion Edwards
Leslie Winner: Spencer Jones
Teresa Smith: Dorothy Atkinson
Chris Smith: Shaun Williamson
Brad: Richard Glover
Rita: Shobu Kapoor
Nurse: Elysia Kenyon
Northern woman: Heather Long
Ajay: Romesh Ranganathan
Ticket inspector: Geoffrey Aymer
Mermaid girl: Mia Hignett
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.