Can You Keep a Secret? Dawn French’s new comedy is a ‘surprising treat’

Dawn French is back, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, in a new BBC comedy series that is the best thing she has done since “The Vicar of Dibley”.

In it, she plays a woman who tries to defraud an insurance company by pretending that her husband William (Mark Heap) is dead. This scheme arises from a “misunderstanding”: after William takes too much of his Parkinson’s medicine, at their home in the West Country, the germophobic local GP issues a death certificate without properly examining his body. When he then wakes up alive, Debbie (French) urges him to stay dead, so that they can claim a £250,000 insurance payout.

William, we learn, has always been a near-hermit, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now his isolation is “simply enforced”. But the couple’s son Harry (Craig Roberts), who had been grieving for his father, is “traumatised by both the deception and the criminality around it” – not least because his wife (Mandip Gill) is a police officer.

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None of this creates groundbreaking comedy, but “Can You Keep a Secret?” is warm and funny, with an underlying sense of melancholy that those familiar with classic British sitcoms will recognise.

Some of the gags could be “sharper”, said Ben Dowell in The Times, and a running joke about a character called Pigfish who is given to sticking petrol pumps up his bottom outstays its welcome. But the show is “beautifully performed”, and a blackmail subplot creates a real sense of jeopardy. The series takes a while to find its heart, but turns out to be “a surprising treat”.