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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Sarah Dempster

Twenty Twenty Six review – Hugh Bonneville’s World Cup comedy wields jokes as subtly as foam mallets

The pair stand in front of a screen with a picture of a football looking like the world, with the words TWENTY TWENTY SIX emblazoned across it
Hapless pair … Hugh Skinner (left) as Will Humphries and Hugh Bonneville as Ian Fletcher. Photograph: BBC/Expectation Entertainment/Jack Barnes/PA

It’s a Monday morning in Miami and Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) is in a meeting. The meeting has been set up to action another meeting, the outcome of which will be actioned – or at least consciously tabled – at a third, or possibly seventh, meeting. The meeting is also a meeting in a deeper sense, in that it is an opportunity for Ian, the “incoming director of integrity” at the organising body for world football (which, states the narrator, David Tennant, “we’re unable to name for legal reasons”), to establish his place in a corporate culture that is “irretrievably American”.

“Shall we begin?”, Ian asks his new colleagues. “Oh my God,” gasps the sustainability tsar, Sarah Campbell (Chelsey Crisp), pressing the palm of her hand swooningly to her breastbone. “Soooo British!”

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