Double trouble

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• Publication title: Signal

SHEEN and Tennant, Tennant and Sheen. David Tennant and Michael Sheen’s double act is so well honed they parody it in BBC meta-comedy Staged. It feels as if they have been together forever, but their on-screen partnership only dates back to 2019 and the first season of Good Omens

Fans of the 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett waited decades for a television take on the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, working together to avert Armageddon in a world where heaven and hell are petty bureaucracies and the universe’s strongest force is flawed humanity. With Gaiman in charge of the series, the book’s vision had been rendered well enough, but all the magic was in the casting of two lead actors with similar sensibilities — a swaggering mischief built on sharp consonants and glinting intellect.

For season two there is no more book to dramatise, so the makers are free to play to series one’s strengths. Good Omens 2 is more the Tennant and Sheen Show than ever. If it’s not sure what else it is, perhaps that doesn’t matter.

Expanding on the episode that recounted the whole history of the world as background for Aziraphale (Sheen) and Crowley’s (Tennant) unlikely companionship, season two sends them on self-contained flashback adventures — these ‘‘minisodes’’ are woven into the regular action but have been farmed out to different writers, separately credited. In one instalment, Az and Crow are in the Land of Uz, plotting to make Job’s punishment by God a bit less over-the-top; in the next, they pitch up in Edinburgh in 1827 — Burke and Hare’s stamping ground — to wrestle with the ethics of graverobbing.

The fussy angel and remorseless demon as attracted opposites, learning to love the other’s extremes during an eternity spent together, remains a nice idea, and there’s a sneaky thrill in seeing more than one new acquaintance assume that Aziraphale and Crowley are a couple. Plus, aside from showcasing the grubby lushness of the historical set design, these detours are a mine of fan-pleasing Easter eggs. The identity of the actor playing Job is an amusing reveal if, like most of Good Omens’ audience, you have a strong interest in Tennant personally, while the minisode set in 1941 during the Blitz is a full League of Gentlemen reunion, co-scripted by Jeremy Dyson, with Steve Pemberton and Mark Gatiss appearing as Nazis, alongside Reece Shearsmith as an embittered administrator trying to weasel himself into a cushy management role in hell.

The...