“Count Arthur Strong could become one of the great British comic characters of our time”
The Scotsman, 2003
With nurturing the cultish Count Arthur Strong could become one of the great British comic characters of our time. You’ve not seen or heard anything quite like him since the golden days of the Goons, I’m sorry I’ll Read that Again or Beyond the Fringe. Think Alan Partridge’s small town media star, Basil Fawlty’s irascibility and Mr Magoo’s sheer befuddlement, all wrapped up in the demented self-righteousness of a deaf great uncle.
Count Arthur hosts a cable cooking show, is chief communion wine taster and runs a performance academy, all in Doncaster. Tonight he’s giving one of his lectures on the watershed of mankind’s history from Genesis, through to King Richard the Bonaparte and Charles Dance’s Origin of the Species, to Cliff Richard and beyond. But he can’t concentrate: he’s too worked up about the news that a local publishing firm – up until now specialists in laundry tickets – haven’t commissioned an “auto-book of myself”. Succumbing to more tangents than a trig text, the rages get hotter, the nonsense more surreal, the samplings of alter wine deeper, the back to the audience periods longer.
A genuinely agonising, hilarious, intricately woven and bizarre creation.
