The stars of People Just Do Nothing and King Gary team up for a finely-calibrated show about idiots planning a heist in a gorgeously rendered 1980s London
It’s worth prioritising The Curse just to hear the voice Tom Davis does in it. He has written himself the part of hulking weirdo Mick, a grimy, pie-stealing cartoon of a man whose tank tops are four inches too short and whose anecdotes about sparring with George Foreman (“They call me into the ring, my old Aristotle’s going like a rabbit’s nose … you ever been kicked by a ’orse?”) are clearly fraudulent. But the voice! A fruity back-of-the-throat baritone with loose consonants bouncing off a lolling lower lip and splashing everywhere, like a cockney Bernard Ingham – it’s a thick extra layer of funny on an already very funny script, and it’s the sound of a man at the top of his character-comedy game.
Davis and his long-term collaborator, co-writer/director James De Frond, are in a run of form that suggests they can do just about anything. After the cleverly marshalled absurdity of innovative BBC Three meta-comedy Murder in Successville, they skipped through one series of spy spoof Action Team on ITV2 before landing on BBC One with the perfectly formed suburban sitcom King Gary. Now, still insisting on launching each new project via a different channel and in a different genre, they switch to Channel 4 for period crime caper The Curse.
