If you like Ted Lasso, this gag-filled newspaper comedy is worth a try: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Sky One's The Paper

The Paper (Sky One) 

Rating:

America and Britain, as the playwright George Bernard Shaw quipped, are two countries divided by a common language. 

But the gulf is wider and weirder than that. We laugh at the same things, for entirely different reasons.

US TV producers love our sitcoms, and rush to remake them with an American cast. But then they rewrite the gags, change the characters and end up with a completely unrecognisable show.

It’s been happening since the States imported Johnny Speight’s savage 1960s comedy Till Death Us Do Part, and turned it into the hit All In The Family.

In place of the bitter, misanthropic Cockney bully, Alf Garnett, they invented the curmudgeonly but lovable Archie Bunker.

And though they immediately saw the attraction of Ricky Gervais’s mockumentary The Office in 2001, they didn’t get David Brent at all — so they replaced him with the gauche and sweetly needy Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell.

The Office US ran for nine seasons, far longer than the original. And it has spawned a spin-off of its own, The Paper, which returns for a second series on Sky One. 

All ten episodes are available on the Now streaming service, along with last year’s opening run.

Any notion that Slough’s version of The Office is the grandparent of The Paper seems unfathomable. 

It isn’t just that the weaselly, selfish David Brent is so unlike Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the eager editor of the Toledo Truth Teller in Ohio.

The point is that Americans were appalled by Brent’s underlying nastiness, and had to expunge it . . . whereas the British can never quite trust well-meaning, kindly, overenthusiastic bosses who have our best interests at heart. 

We want to believe — but then, we want to believe in Father Christmas as well.

Ned is a carbon copy of Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, the US football coach who instils team spirit in a struggling Premier League club. If you liked that show, it’s well worth trying a few half-hour episodes of The Paper.

I enjoyed it, but anything that sends up my profession is likely to get me laughing — such as the junior hack who was trying to get his head around the sneaky trick of drafting an election story before the results are actually in.

Scratching his head, he demanded: ‘So, whatever we write here, just happens tomorrow?’

British comedian Tim Key, a master of the one-liner, is playing his usual fish-out-of-water type, but he is very much at home with the rapidfire pattern of US sitcom dialogue, with a joke in every line.

After a colleague died suddenly, while cooking a batch of methamphetamine (a hobby none of his co-workers had suspected), Tim mused, ‘I’m ruminating on the shortness of life, but also how long it always feels between breakfast and lunch.’

There’s a philosophical conundrum that makes sense on both sides of the ocean.