TV Pick of the Week: Douglas is Cancelled - review by Yvette Huddleston

After a routine show, a Tweet appears from someone claiming that he overheard Douglas telling a sexist joke at a family wedding. Douglas’s producer Toby (Ben Miles) alerts him to the fact, questions him carefully about it and Douglas is unperturbed by it. He says he doesn’t remember the joke (having drunk a little wine) and, as the person who tweeted the allegation has very few followers, he is certain that “it will burn itself out.”

However, Madeline then retweets the tweet, apparently in defence of her colleague. She has 2 million followers on Twitter, so inevitably the whole story very quickly goes viral. Moffat’s script skilfully leaves it ambiguous as to what Madeline’s motivation actually is. Douglas’s safe and privileged life then starts to go into a bit of a tailspin. His tabloid editor wife Sheila (Alex Kingston) knows the drill on these kinds of stories, she has brought down a few celebrities in her time, and can see the direction it may go in, while his activist student daughter Claudia (Madeleine Power) is not impressed, and tells him she hopes she won’t have to cancel him.

It then becomes a question of damage limitation. Toby gets resident comedian Morgan (Nick Mohammed) on board and asks him to try and come up with a joke that Douglas might have told which is slightly dodgy but not actually offensive. Douglas has an appearance at Hay Festival coming up so there is also a race-against-time element to the narrative as the team rally to try and prepare him for a grilling by the interviewer, who Toby notes nervously “is a female Newsnight presenter”, and try and save his career.

The tonal shifts can sometimes be a bit jarring, which is perhaps the point, but overall Moffat manages a fine balancing act between satire and an exploration of serious, timely issues. There are scenes which are genuinely uncomfortable including a flashback to a creepy, unsettling hotel room encounter between Toby and Madeline in which he is supposedly interviewing her for a job. The performances from all the cast are excellent and the thought-provoking material certainly gives them plenty to get their teeth into.