The Reluctant Landlord, Sky One

In this new six-part sitcom, comedian-turned-actor Romesh Ranganathan plays a man-child called Romesh Ranganathan who takes over the pub once run by his late father and so becomes the reluctant landlord of the title. He lives in the flat upstairs with his two primary school age kids and his chirpy, lawyer wife Natasha (Car Share’s Sian Gibson). He loves hip-hop, superheroes and crisps.

If Ranganathan himself has a superpower it’s an ability to persuade people who commission TV programmes to let him do this sort of thing – take an unlikely idea and turn it into a show about himself, usually one where he just stands around looking puzzled and being rude to people. In The Reluctant Landlord he does it with a pint in his hand but it’s essentially the same play we saw in the BBC series The Misadventures Of Romesh Ranganathan, in which he turned tourist to visit places such as Albania and Haiti, and Asian Provocateur, in which he visited Sri Lanka to learn more about his Tamil background. The personal connection here is that although this is a sitcom it’s also essentially a true story – Ranganathan’s dad did run a pub and he did take it over after his father’s death in 2011.

If you saw Lennie James’s brilliant Sky Atlantic drama Save Me then just imagine The Reluctant Landlord as a potty-mouthed comedy version of its (many) pub scenes, with a different Irish actress pulling the pints (in this case Yasmine Akram) and a dopey regular – played by Nick Helm – who’s known as Lemon rather than Melon (Stephen Graham’s character in Save Me). In what may even be a mini-homage to Save Me, Lemon is actually referred to as Melon by another character who could have stepped out of James’s drama, racist ex-jailbird Dirty Harry (Phil Davis at his threatening, wild-eyed best).

Harry was the problem needing dealt with in the opening episode. In last week’s second instalment, the problem was how to successfully see off the challenge of the new gastro-pub run by unflappable hipster David Foster (Steve Edge). Romesh’s solution? Host a curry night and let the hapless Lemon do the cooking. It was a bad idea the moment Romesh agreed to it, but when he then set his own arm on fire it became a lot worse.

The publican is a rich character with terrific dramatic and comic potential, which is why you find him (and her) in everything from Chaucer to Coronation Street. Ranganathan’s own connection with the pub trade gives him added purchase on the archetype and, though the domestic storylines sometimes feel clunky, it’s in the persona of the curmudgeonly landlord and his withering bar-room exchanges that that you find the show’s comic engine. I'll have another, thanks.