There is an undoubted sense in which new Channel 4 series Chivalry, co-written by and co-starring Steve Coogan and Sarah Solemani, asks the question, “What if Alan Partridge were a successful Hollywood producer in the post-#MeToo era?” This is a question worth asking, especially when the answers are as good and funny and deft as they are here.
Coogan plays Cameron, a fairly (one imagines) typical film producer. He’s just coming out of another relationship with a twentysomething partner who was his assistant. He has slept with the leading lady he is now trying to persuade to reshoot scenes from his latest project. And he is just bright enough to know he’s being left behind as this strange, new landscape emerges, but not bright enough to know how to adapt to it. When Bobby (Solemani), the indie darling who has been brought in to detoxify the project poisoned by its European old-guard director, shouts “Sorry!” as she rushes off mid-conversation, because a call about her son comes through, he shouts back: “Never apologise for being a mother!” It’s the perfect amount of wrongness that Partridge made his own.
