Why Frasier and Nicholas Lyndhurst are a match made in comedy heaven

The news that the much-loved sitcom Frasier is to return, nearly two decades after its original conclusion, has not been met with universal joy. No Niles, no Daphne and no Martin means that the new series runs the risk of being an also-ran to one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, rather than a worthy continuation.

Yet there is one reason to be cautiously optimistic. It was announced in January – in a piece of casting that will mean rather more to British viewers than American ones – that the great Only Fools and Horses star Nicholas Lyndhurst would take on a major role as Frasier’s “boozy, British and larger than life” college friend-turned-university professor Alan Cornwell.

The publicity blurb suggested that “Alan’s mischievous streak might be just what Frasier could use to shake up his routine, while Frasier’s thoughtful guidance might help Alan find some of the direction he’s been missing in his own life.” A bromance of sorts beckons, then, and given the excellence of both actors, this could yet prove a worthy continuation of the Frasier and Niles dynamic.

Despite the friendship that has grown up between the two men, their personalities and working methods could barely be more different. Grammer, whose offscreen life has encompassed everything from drug and alcohol addiction to the violent deaths of several family members, was frequently a chaotic and out-of-control presence on the Frasier set, which led his cast mates to stage an intervention in 1996.

As his co-star John Mahoney once said: “It’s going to somebody’s house whom you love, who’s down, and just beating him down even further for his own good. And it was horrifying.” The 62-year-old Lyndhurst, meanwhile, is famously private. He won’t attend premieres of work that he has starred in and changed his own wedding date in a bid to keep it out of the papers.

But how did this unlikely duo – one a much-married former hellraiser, the other a taciturn family man - come about? Grammer and Lyndhurst first met while appearing alongside one another in the 2019 ENO revival of the musical Man of La Mancha.

Grammer told ITV that “we just fell madly in love… we’ve been sort of crazy about each other ever since and we intend to work together for a long time to come.” He later elaborated: “I warned them in America. I said: ‘Wait until this guy gets here. You’ll be doing a scene with him and suddenly you realise he’s just run off with it.’ He’s an extraordinary actor, a dear friend. And I am so pleased he’s part of it.”

The star has even suggested that the Cornwell character will be a co-lead, rather than a recurring supporting character, meaning that the pressure will be on his co-star to live up to the hype. Clearly Lyndhurst has got the comic chops, but in America he is very much an unknown quantity: only his villainous performance as Uriah Heep in the 1999 television adaptation of David Copperfield is likely to have acquired any international traction. Lyndhurst has yet to give any interviews or comment publicly about his involvement with the rebooted show.  He has largely retreated from the public eye since he and his wife lost their son Archie, 19, in October 2020 to acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

Of course, there is a large element of Anglophilia in Frasier’s make-up. Not only was one of its central characters, Jane Leeves’s Daphne Moon, a Mancunian (albeit played by Leeves with a perplexing accent), but the actor John Mahoney, who played Frasier and Niles’s father Martin, grew up in Manchester and emigrated to the United States aged 18.

There were also guest appearances from countless British actors over the course of the series, ranging from Richard E Grant and Robbie Coltrane as two of Daphne’s brothers, introduced in the series finale Goodnight Seattle and featuring, in Coltrane’s case, one of the strangest ‘English’ accents that has ever been heard on screen.

There were substantial and satisfying appearances from a pair of theatrical knights, Derek Jacobi and Patrick Stewart. Jacobi appeared in the episode The Show Must Go Off’ in a deliciously self-parodying role as Jackson Hedley, a conceited Shakespearean actor, while Stewart called the role of Alistair Burke, a suave, gay opera director with designs on Frasier.

Yet the show’s Anglophilia stretches deeper than its casting. Throughout the course of its 11 seasons, Frasier revelled in its status as a comedy for intellectuals, and often made highbrow references to English literature – as befitted the snobbish pretensions of Frasier and Niles. It is hard to think of any other American sitcom that contains allusions to Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, and that expects the audiences to get the joke without having it spoon-fed to them.

Yet much of the fun of Frasier is in the consistently delicious way that it punctures the pomposity of its two leads by having them caught up in farcical, dignity-shredding situations that often result in their considerable egos being taken down several pegs. This is strongly reminiscent of all kinds of British humour, ranging from the Aldwych farces of Ben Travers to perennially popular Seventies sitcoms such as Dad’s Army, Porridge and Fawlty Towers.

Frasier and Niles themselves battle throughout the course of the show to be seen as the greater Anglophile, associating ‘the old country’ with sophistication and learning. In one episode, Frasier declares: “There’s no greater Anglophile than I. I have all my suits made at Savile Row. I spell colour with a ‘u’!” Such moments are hugely entertaining, and give an insight into the characters that any English viewer will immediately grasp. Y

et Lyndhurst’s casting in the rebooted series may be more complex than simply Frasier collecting another Brit. As Grammer commented: “It suddenly occurred to me when we were putting the show together, we’ve never really seen Frasier in a relationship where he has a great friend.”

Frasier begins on Paramount+ on October 12