The funny business of being British, and the even funnier business of being foreign, are at the heart of the latest vehicle for the talents of David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They’ve conquered the sketch format and the grimy sitcom but in Ambassadors they branch out into trickier terrain of comedy drama. The show's task is to snigger at the absurdities of international diplomacy while also showing signs of some sort of beating heart.
Mitchell plays Keith Davies, our new man in Tazbekistan, a tinpot Asiatic amalgam of a couple of post-Soviet republics where the methods of communism have made way for more traditional forms of governance. The current president (Yigal Naor, pictured below) conducts diplomacy in the form of men-only drinking contests, and holds meetings with ambassadors while butchering chunks of a recently slaughtered quadruped. We have no idea what animal this is, but can be certain it’s not the mighty ibex, which is the Tazbek national symbol. In this first episode Davies makes the dangerous mistake of shooting one while enjoying the president’s hospitality, thus potentially fouling a huge contract to sell British helicopter gunships to a president bent on mowing down his own people.
Webb plays Neil Tilly, a world-weary chargé d’affaires who has gone semi-native, while an FCO mandarin (Matthew Macfadyen) barks orders over Skype. Davies’s only ally is his resourceful wife Jennifer (Keeley Hawes), who herself has to deal with an uppity chef serving "plov" with everything. In this British outpost it's the women (with an implausibly high level of youth and beauty) who keep the show on the road. It fell to young Tazbek attaché (Shivani Ghai, pictured below) to curate a mini-festival featuring medieval folk music, chutney and a one-man Frankenstein (Elliot Cowan, very funny).
Nothing will ever satirise Central Asian hellholes as brilliantly as the spoof guide book Molvania. But the ghastly ways of Johnny Foreigner form less than half of the target in the writers’ sights. Ambassadors comes from the pen of Rupert Walters and James Wood, the latter also responsible for Rev. A similar elegiac tone imbues this portrait of a dilapidated British institution suffering a moral crisis, and Mitchell while very much his own man has some of Tom Hollander’s touching air of defeated pride. (Hollander plays an idiotic royal-on-tour in the next episode).
If there’s a problem, beyond some sketchy plotting, it’s that Ambassadors doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Webb sometimes seems to be in an entirely different comic time zone, while the scene in the secure room where Mitchell and Webb argue about the so-called right thing to do feels helicoptered in from a bleeding-heart drama by Peter Kosminsky. And yet the laughs come reliably. The tumbling bodies of diplomats poisoned by alcohol is a lovely visual gag. And Mitchell’s hilarious climactic rant to a priapic actor and an ungrateful activist, while delivered with feeling, has the makings of a YouTube collectible.
Should Ambassadorspack its bags and be recalled home? Far from it. Carry on, ambassador
THE MANY SIDES OF KEELEY HAWES, DRAMA QUEEN
Ashes to Ashes, BBC One. Hawes’s Eighties copper goes back to the future in Ashley Pharaoh’s follow-up to Life on Mars
Identity, ITV1. Keeley Hawes and Aidan Gillen on the trail of ruthless cyber-criminals
Line of Duty, BBC Two. Gruelling police corruption thriller keeps spines tingling to the end.
The Casual Vacancy, BBC One. Hawes peddles erotica in JK Rowling's Cotswold village
The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III, BBC Two. Hawes’s first stab at iambic pentameter opposite Benedict Cumberbatch chilly crook-backed king
The Missing, BBC One. Hawes plays a grieving mother in misery-drenched odyssey
Upstairs Downstairs, BBC One. Hawes is the lady of the house as Rose Buck returns to 165 Eaton Place after 35 years.