Is this comic fantasy series a cult hit in the making – or just one for the nerds?

How the wheel turns. I first heard about Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire a few months ago, when I interviewed its star Matt Lucas. “It’s Blackadder and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with some overtones of The Lord of the Rings by way of Red Dwarf,” he said, when I asked for a summary. “I’m one of the baddies, Chancellor Dongalor.”

As it turns out, this was an accurate synopsis, but at the time I was mystified. The one tiny clip
I was allowed to see featured Lucas in a pair of hairy briefs that made him look like he was sporting an extremely lavish merkin or, possibly, a small rodent, and – were my eyes deceiving me? – Sean Maguire in a whole world of leather as Kröd. Sean Maguire? But yes, it was he: the former star of EastEnders and Dangerfield, and a one-time winner of the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party Award for best male act.

Long ago, when I worked for an editor whose hobby was humiliating me, I was despatched to travel in the Smash Hits tour bus as its poll-winners – from P J & Duncan (now known as Ant and Dec) to Kavana (remember?) – traversed the country, driving teenage girls (but not me) wild.

I still have a photograph of myself with Maguire, taken backstage: he is wearing an Aran sweater, is a bit spotty, and is giving me a half-hearted cuddle. I thought he had long since disappeared, but it turns out that he “relocated” to LA some years ago, where he grew a six – or even a seven – pack, learned to speak American, and bagged himself a starring role in the film Meet the Spartans, which took $100m at the box office. And now he is in Kröd Mändoon (Thursdays, 9pm), which may – or may not – go on to win him a whole new cult fan base. Suffice to say: I am amazed.

Is he any good? Kröd, the son of a blacksmith and “a stay-at-home mum”, is supposed to be rescuing the citizens of an ancient realm from the tyranny of Dongalor. But he is completely feeble: sort of like Nick Clegg on steroids. His only helpers are his randy pagan girlfriend, an incompetent wizard, and a slave creature called something like a “Gobble”, who has ears that look like very hairy pork scratchings. They’re doomed! Or they would be, were not Dongalor such a buffoon himself. Hmm. I think (as I push that drippy Aran sweater from my mind) that Maguire sweetly combines strength and sincerity with bafflement and ineptitude, but that he and his posse are acted off the screen by Lucas and his obsequious sidekick Barnabus (Alex MacQueen, best known as Julius, the PM’s lily-livered special adviser in The Thick of It). Lucas is great here: nasty, stupid, camp, lascivious, funny. Even the limpest lines whip to life in his rosebud mouth.

But I’m not sure it’s a goer as a series. It has a great cast and the production values are high quality. It’s well written, too. The way it combines fantasy and 21st-century dialogue can be funny. Dongalor sends bottles of Asti to the widows of men he has murdered, and orders out for muffins during meetings of his terrified advisers. When he kills the wrong courtier by mistake, he comes over all David Brent: “I thought we were going to get the names carved in the back of the chairs. Did that not happen? Let’s make that an action item, shall we?” The trouble is that, once you have seen half an hour, you’ve seen it all. I thought at first that it might be aimed at a teen audience, Buffy-style, but some of the gags are so filthy that that can’t be right (there are anal sex jokes, and one character is in love – in the fullest sense – with his horse).

Perhaps you just have to be a certain kind of hobbit nerd to get along with it. I am not a hobbit nerd, though I’m quite sure that is what Maguire and the other poll-winners thought of me as I sat primly at the front of their tour bus, paperback novel in hand.

Pick of the week

Dispatches
15 June, 8pm, Channel 4
Exploring the effects of US bombing raids on Afghanistan.

Occupation
16-18 June, 9pm, BBC1
James Nesbitt stars in Peter Bowker’s drama about the Iraq War.

The Culture Show
17 June, 7pm, BBC2
An hour-long special on the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.

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