Sky’s Funny Woman is no laughing matter

Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can achieve. Telling the story of Barbara Parker, a fictional 1960s TV star, it took a stern line on highbrows who prize the punishing over the pleasurable, while delivering a lot of pleasure itself. My only reservation was that Hornby was a little too obviously smitten with his heroine: a ‘quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde’, whose attitudes occasionally seemed to owe a suspicious amount to contemporary feminism.

The trouble with Sky’s television version – renamed Funny Woman – is that the ‘occasionally’ of that last sentence has become ‘pretty much always’, with Barbara now a kind of Blackadder figure: someone from our own day stuck in a benighted past. The result on Thursday was a first episode that, while quite jolly, felt too much on the nose to be anything more than disappointingly superficial.

After a swift blizzard of images confirming that it was indeed the 1960s, Barbara (Gemma Arterton) was seen being crowned Miss Blackpool 1964 despite her fears that ‘Janice Alstrop has a bigger beehive’.