A rotting caravan squats outside a crumbling stately pile: inside lives Matt Lucas’s portly, penniless Lord Pompidou, a silk-wrapped relic surviving on tinned beans and delusions of grandeur. With only gibberish, grunts and the occasional clipped “Good afternoon”, he torments his ever-loyal butler Alex Macqueen and Afghan hound Marion through six wordless, 25-minute disasters—lottery tickets, hoarding, hypothermia—filmed at Langleybury, Hertfordshire in 2013-14 and broadcast on BBC Two from 1 March to 5 April 2015.
The series revived the near-extinct form of the half-hour silent sitcom last seen in Bradley three decades earlier, citing Chaplin, Tati and Pingu as touchstones and aiming for a global, child-friendly audience. Viewers did not reciprocate: ratings slid from 0.84 m to 0.5 m, critics labelled it “pretty painful” (Telegraph) and “a strange beast” (Radio Times), and on Netflix it became the platform’s lowest-rated original.
Yet the show’s creators—Lucas, Julian Dutton, Ashley Blaker, James Lamont and Jon Foster—stand by the experiment, arguing that British snobbery toward silent comedy doomed it from the start.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 6 Episodes / 2015
Created by: Matt Lucas, Ashley Blaker, Julian Dutton
Writer(s): Jon Foster
Producer(s): Charlie HansonKatie Mavroleon
Main Cast
Matt Lucas as Pompidou
Alex Macqueen as Hove
Andy Heath as Marion
Yvonne Stone as Actor
Anita Dobson as
Hadley Fraser as Maitre'd
Ivan Gonzalez as Bandaged Man
