CAST ASIDE (STAGED, SERIES TWO)

There's something wonderfully perverse about watching a sitcom based around video conferencing after spending the day video conferencing.

Welcome to the second series of BBC1's lockdown sitcom 'Staged' in which Michael Sheen and David Tennant fret over Zoom about their professional reputations and encourage a host of other celebrities to send up themselves.

The first series in June 2020 saw Tennant and Sheen engage Judi Dench, Adrian Lester and Samuel L Jackson as they rehearsed a Pirandello play 'Two Actors In Search of an Ending' which they intended to star in on the West End as soon as lockdown ended.

It was a clever meta concept as Pirandello's play is about two actors rehearsing a play.

In another meta twist, series two begins with Sheen and Tennant appearing on a BBC show hosted by Romesh Ranganathan via Zoom with Michael Palin to discuss the success of the previous series.

Tennant and Sheen bask in the glory of their fans' enthusiasm for series one of 'Staged' but are rattled when Palin damns it with faint praise.

Not only are they shaken when the Monty Python turns out not to be the nice man off camera that his public persona suggests but they are outraged when he disparages improv and implies their comedy will not stand the test of time.

Sheen and Tennant suffer a further setback when they learn that their collaborator on 'Staged,' Simon Evans has been flown to LA to help write an American remake of the show while they remain in Port Talbot and London.

To add insult to injury, while Simon is being employed as a scriptwriter and most of the supporting cast from the original have been retained, Tennant and Sheen have been overlooked to reprise their roles because they are not household names in the United States.

At first, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are mooted.

But over the course of several episodes, a series of other contenders emerge for the parts, with Sheen and Tennant initially being encouraged by their fierce US agent Whoopi Goldberg's Mary to help the auditioning actors on Zoom read throughs.

The duo, however, set out to undermine the contenders, so they can eventually land their parts.

Not everything goes according to plan and they don't always emerge from these encounters with the other actors unscathed.

First up are Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, with Tennant taking umbrage at both actors wanting the Sheen part and claiming his persona on the show is inert.

After the Pegg and Frost read through goes disastrously, the duo carry out separate read throughs with other actors auditioning for their comedy partner's role.

Sheen gets to read with a hot headed Ewan McGregor, Ken Jeong who does a piss poor English accent and a highly demanding Josh Gad.

Christoph Waltz, Hugh Bonneville and Jim Parsons get irritated by Tennant's guidance or occasional bouts of self-obsession.

When the producers decide to cast Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Cate Blanchett instead, it all comes to a head with Sheen learning how he missed out on a Peter Jackson film and Tennant's uncomfortable past with the 'Fleabag' creator coming to light.

As with series one, Tennant and Sheen's real life partners Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg turn up from time to time to sooth the leads' bruised egos or share each other's experience of handling their partners' neuroses.

At one point, they plan with Simon's sister, Lucy Eaton a reworking of a scene from the first series for a charity event and agree that Simon is not good at writing parts for women.

However series two also is very effective in drawing out the need for connection in a world that has restricted most of us to interacting with others direct from our living rooms, kitchens or, if we are lucky, studies.

As with the first series, writer and director Simon Evans and his leads run the risk of the show succumbing to full force luvvydom.

However, they get away with it once again by bursting Sheen, Tennant and other celebrities' public personas.

Like all good sitcoms, series two builds on the first in unexpected ways - with a quite touching depiction of friendship and by reflecting on the yearning for human connections and rites of passage that we probably took for granted pre-Covid.

More importantly, the eight episodes seem sharper with even more laugh out loud moments than the first.

'Staged' has carved a place out for itself covering a strange time in all our lives, viewed from a celebrity lens.

With the Coronavirus likely to restrict the way we live for at least another year, it provides some much needed comic relief for audiences craving a return to normality. 

If it can still keep grounded, then roll on another series.

('Staged' was broadcast on BBC1 from January 4-26, 2020)