The comedy of tragic naffness and minor-celeb purgatory takes a horrible new turn in Mindhorn, a farcical nightmare starring Mighty Boosh veteran Julian Barratt and co-written by him and Simon Farnaby. It is directed with a light and playful touch by Sean Foley, making his cinema debut after much admired comic theatre work alongside Hamish McColl in The Right Size stage company.



Mindhorn is built on a teetering tower of self-aware showbiz failure whose flavour will be familiar to any connoisseur of British TV comedy from the past 10 or 15 years; it is a little bit derivative – and, inevitably, the comedy is mostly frontloaded into its premise and opening act. But there are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.

Barratt plays Richard Thorncroft, a grotesque has-been actor who back in the early 80s, resplendent with the handsomeness of a young Lewis Collins, had his moment of fame playing a TV cop called Mindhorn. This was a tough officer who was subjected to a bionic-style experiment: his left eye was removed and replaced with a hi-tech scanner set into an old-fashioned eyepatch – allowing him to beam supersonically into anyone’s mind and see through criminal lies.

His roistering adventures came to an end when the series was cancelled – and he managed to insult every cast member and everyone on the Isle of Man, where the show was set, on an ill-judged appearance on Wogan before heading off to LA where he assumed Hollywood fame was the natural next step.

But it never worked out and the poor sap is now an unemployed, overweight, middle-aged actor living in a north London bedsit with his memories, his hairpiece (time has taken its toll on the luxurious mane) and his extensive collection of Mindhorn memorabilia. He has been fired from a TV ad for orthopaedic socks and replaced with John Nettles. His beautiful onscreen/offscreen flame Patricia Deville (Essie Davis) from those days is still in the Isle of Man, employed as a local TV journalist, happily married to a man who was once Thorncroft’s stuntman. To add to his humiliation and despair, an absurdly minor character from the show, played by Steve Coogan, became a huge success with a spinoff.

But out of the blue, poor Thorncroft has a shot at career redemption. A crazed killer is terrorising the Isle of Man and has a delusional fan-obsession with Mindhorn from old videocassette copies; he thinks Mindhorn is real and is prepared to negotiate with Mindhorn and only Mindhorn. Thorncroft is offered by the police the chance to come back to his old stomping ground and talk to this monster in character. But to the horror of one and all, Thorncroft sees in this a glorious PR opportunity – a chance to kickstart his ailing career.



Of course, this is a man of Partridgean self-deception and conceit. The Isle of Man is to him what Norwich was to Alan Partridge and Slough was to David Brent. Like Matt Berry’s honey-voiced actor Steven Toast, Thorncroft has a tricky relationship with his agent – beautifully played here by Harriet Walter. But Toast is very much a man about town in London and Thorncroft finds his destiny in the Isle of Man. In real life, moreover, as good fortune would have it, the Isle of Man is the home of a substantial amount of film-funding for movie projects set in the Isle of Man.

As for Mindhorn being real, or quasi-real, Barrett might have taken some inspiration from the movie classic Galaxy Quest, which rested on a similar idea, or maybe even the film Novocaine in which Kevin Bacon was a method actor preparing to play a cop, who is taken along on a case by police and turns out to be better at spotting clues than the real officers.

It is wildly silly and raucous, and there is a genuine creepiness and despair in the movie’s later scenes in which Thorncroft finds himself literally imprisoned in the Mindhorn costume. Inevitably the comedy thins out into knockabout wackiness towards the end; but Mindhorn is a creation to savour.