We have always loved a telly grump. From the immortal, splenetic rages of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave to Basil Fawlty’s class-conscious hotel-keeping hysterics, British television has a proud, glorious tradition of celebrating middle-aged men who find the modern world deeply, profoundly offensive. There is something intensely cathartic about watching a bloke lose his mind over a faulty garden gate or a botched reservation; it gives us all permission to tut at the daily indignities of modern life from the comfort of our sofas.

Enter Warren Thompson. Played by national treasure Martin Clunes—an actor who can usually wring every ounce of roguish charm and empathetic humanity out of the most difficult characters—this latest small-screen curmudgeon arrives with the aerodynamic grace of a double-decker bus reversing into a brick wall.

Written by newcomers Jimmy Donny Cosgrove and Paul McKenna, this sitcom dumps Clunes into the role of a pedantic, penny-pinching driving instructor who has been reluctantly dragged from the sunny south up to Preston. Why? Because his long-suffering partner, Anne (played with heroic, saintly patience by Lisa Millett), needs to look after her ailing father.

From the off, Warren hates everything. He hates the North, he hates his job, he hates his two teenage stepsons (Charlie and Danny), and above all else, he hates spending a single solitary penny of his hard-earned cash.

The trouble is, while television history is littered with loveable grumpy gits, Warren isn’t just grumpy. He is, to put it bluntly, an absolute nightmare of a human being.

Normal comic grumpiness stems from frustrated ambitions or a desperate, touching desire for order in a chaotic world. Victor Meldrew wanted a quiet, dignified retirement; Basil Fawlty aspired to run an establishment for the gentry. Warren, however, possesses no grand illusions or moral compass. He is simply a walking, breathing black hole of selfish petulance.

In the opening episode alone, we watch in mounting disbelief as our leading man attempts to scheme his way into a cheap garden pond liner by forcing his stepson into a miserable retail job, before resorting to petty fly-tipping just to save a trip to the local tip. Later episodes see him waging petty, microscopic turf wars with his unfortunate next-door neighbour, Ian (played with twitchy brilliance by Neil Edmond), over trivialities that wouldn’t raise the pulse of a flatlining slug.

And therein lies the rub. Clunes is a phenomenal actor—as anyone who watched him play the cold, meticulous real-life detective DCI Colin Sutton in ITV’s gripping true-crime drama Manhunt can readily attest. He possesses an innate, earthy warmth that practically radiates through the cathode ray tube. Yet here, he is trapped playing a man so utterly devoid of redeeming social features that you find yourself checking your watch, wondering when the poor driving students trapped in the passenger seat are going to stage a mutiny.

Speaking of the driving lessons, the sitcom misses an open goal of comedic potential. Imagine the sheer, unadulterated comic terror of being stuck in a Vauxhall Corsa with a petty tyrant who treats a three-point turn like a war crime. Instead of leaning into the rich tapestry of automotive anxiety, the scripts frequently sideline the driving school aspect in favor of flat, pedestrian domestic bickering.

The supporting cast, too, are given precious little room to breathe. Lisa Millett’s Anne is shoehorned into the tired, dusty television archetype of the ‘long-suffering partner’. She bakes cakes, she smiles placidly through Warren’s blistering selfishness, and she acts as a walking human punchline absorber. One desperately wishes the writers had given her a backbone—or at least a rolling pin—to knock Warren down a peg or two.

Instead, the comedy relies heavily on old-fashioned, stop-start mechanics. There are moments—particularly when the family is squeezed into an eight-seater vehicle heading to a disastrous family funeral—where the claustrophobic friction threatens to spark genuine laughs. You can see the ghost of classic 1970s British sitcoms hovering in the rearview mirror. But the dialogue frequently feels limp, relying on the characters shouting “Warren!” like a punctuation mark just to remind us whose name is on the billing.

It is deeply disheartening because British television is currently undergoing a golden renaissance for narrative comedy. Shows like Catastrophe, Car Share, and This Country have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the domestic sitcom format is far from dead—provided it is approached with sharp writing, genuine observation, and fierce originality.

By comparison, this series feels like an artifact unearthed from a dusty time capsule marked ‘Safe BBC One Primetime, 1985’. It lacks the biting satirical edge of Armando Iannucci or the tender, heartbreaking awkwardness of modern indie comedies. It is safe, predictable, and stubbornly stuck in first gear.

Do not mistake me: Martin Clunes remains an absolute joy to watch, even when he is lumbered with material that asks him to scowl for thirty minutes straight. There are fleeting, beautiful flashes where you catch a glimpse of the man behind the perpetual grimace—a flicker of vulnerability that suggests Warren is just terrified of growing old and irrelevant.

Unfortunately, those moments are buried beneath an avalanche of mean-spirited plotting and characters you wouldn’t want to share a bus shelter with during a downpour.

If you are looking for gentle, mildly irritating Sunday evening background noise while you polish off the leftovers from the roast chicken, this might just tick the box. But if you want a comedy that actually accelerates, you’d be better off stalling.