Sloane Ranger and Queen Park Ranger ride again

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

If you met Jeremy Sloane in your local pub, you’d suddenly remember that you had to go home and wash what’s left of your hair – because he’s the sort of hapless, hopeless character who could suck out of you all of your will to live.

And yet this anti-hero of sorts is understandably a big hit with satellite viewers, who are tuning into Mr Sloane on Sky Atlantic in their droves.

The creation of Shaun of the Dead star Nick Frost, this comedy is set in a suburb of Watford at the end of the swinging sixties – a swing which Sloane appears to have missed in its entirety, given that he looks more like a relic from the war years.

He’s full of figure, wears heavy black spectacles and a mac; he could be mistaken for a boring civil servant every day of the week, but it reality his life is falling apart at the seams.

His wife Janet (played by the wonderful Olivia Coleman, star of just about everything these days – from Broadchurch to Rev to Twenty Twelve – has left him and he’s just just lost his job.

His social life revolves around the pub every night with his three best mates from childhood, Ross (Peter Serafinowicz), Reggie (Brendan Patricks) and Beans (Lawry Lewin), who have as much sympathy for his plight as Manchester City fans had for David Moyes.

Sloane is also a dreamer and he truly wants to make his life better, even if it keeps dragging him back into the mire.

He subscribes to ‘self-help’ cassettes – the big old eight-track things that arrive in brown paper from the US – and he even imagines the start of a new life with a flirty American he meets in the hardware store, who has a problem with her u-bend under the sink.

Sloane’s happier days are depicted in flashback – his first encounter with Janet on the Tube, their wedding day, happier times in the office with his old buddy Beans who is still living at home with his mother.

Nick Frost brings a wonderful quiet quality to the role – Sloane is clearly a man who’s down on his luck and caught in a negative spiral, but he’s sympathetically played by an actor whose television appearances have been massively reduced by his big screen successes.

One man who television appearances would normally be nil at this time of the year managed to create a whole lot of headlines of his own last week with a debut appearance on BBC’s Question Time.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.