Funny Woman series two review – Gemma Arterton is tediously perfect

Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was about a woman with the mind of a comedy nerd and the looks of a pin-up model: Barbara Parker may have been crowned Miss Blackpool, but she was desperate to escape her home town and follow in the footsteps of her idol, Lucille Ball. It’s no spoiler to reveal that she becomes a star – albeit in the musty world of mid-century British sitcom rather than its glamorous US counterpart.

Funny Woman, the Sky adaptation of that novel, stripped away this fixation with comedy. In series one, Parker – who changes her name to Sophie Straw at the behest of a sleazy agent (Rupert Everett, in an off-puttingly hammy perfor...
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