Mimicry is a kind of tribute, impressionism a kind of honour.
It's why Harold Wilson was desperate to shake hands with Mike Yarwood and Edwina Currie bought her Spitting Image puppet. We copy someone because we love them. It's what impressionists, even the seemingly cruel ones, do all the time.
You can especially see this in the work of Terry Mynott, the star of The Mimic (Channel 4, Wednesday, 10pm). Check out the YouTube clip of him doing impressions of famous people with marvellous fruity voices – Alec Guinness, Arthur Lowe, Peter O'Toole – and it's obvious he has great affection for everyone he's sending up. Indeed, the clip makes you pine a little bit for how television and films used to sound – the days when syllables were lingered over and Rs were rolled, when Michael Hordern narrated Paddington and Kenneth Kendall presented the news. The days before Alan Carr and Melanie Skyes and Sara Cox, before the squawking and mumbling.
Mynott's take on impersonating people in The Mimic has a rather marvellous twist. This isn't the usual idea in which the mimic pretends to be other people in a succession of sketches. This is a new idea. It is unlike any other show. It is an impressionist show which is copying no-one.
The twist is that Mynott isn't doing the impressions directly – he is playing a man who is doing the impressionists. The man is Martin Hurdle, a slightly feckless repair man at a faceless company on an industrial estate. He is bored stiff in his job so, in Walter Mitty fashion, he drifts off on surreal riffs using his skill as an imitator. At the start of the first episode, for example, we find him sitting in a traffic jam. His radio is broken so he does Terry Wogan's voice himself.
The highlight of this surreality is when Mynott's character is sitting on the sofa watching a clip of some emperor penguins and starts up a conversation between Samuel L Jackson and James Earl Jones about who would be best at narrating March Of The Penguins.
"My favourite side of a penguin is the dark side," says Mynott as Earl Jones before he gets to wondering about the kind of roles he plays. "Luke, I am your father. Simba, I am also your father. That was some summer. Why are all my movies about being a father?"
Pulling off this multi-layered surreality is not easy – Mynott is a man playing a character playing a character – but he does, and is funny as well. What's also refreshing is that, like Limmy in Scotland, Mynott first started working online before gradually moving to television. It was talent bubbling up rather than mediocrity seeping down.
And it's new as well. So often in this space, I point out how something that is apparently new is really just a reworking, rehashing or reflogging of something that has gone before, but that could never be said of The Mimic. It is properly, genuinely, happily, a new and funny idea.
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