My Hero

This is deliberate. My Hero is written as a warm family sitcom first and a superhero show a distant second. The tone is closer to Keeping Up Appearances or Only Fools and Horses than to anything American and cape-based. Children are in the audience. Nothing is edgy. The worst anyone does is embarrass themselves at a neighbour's barbecue.

"A gentle tea-time sitcom with a superhero sitting at the kitchen table. It should not have worked as long as it did, and the fact that it did is down almost entirely to Ardal O'Hanlon."

📉 The Recast and the End

Here the story gets honest. After series five, O'Hanlon left the show to pursue other commitments, and James Dreyfus was brought in for series six in 2006 with an in-universe explanation involving George losing his human identity in a poker game. It did not work. At all.

Dreyfus is a capable comic actor, but Thermoman is an Ardal O'Hanlon role the way Dougal is an Ardal O'Hanlon role. You do not replace that kind of casting and keep the audience. Ratings collapsed from the 6 to 8 million viewer range of the early seasons to 3 to 4 million on Friday primetime, and then to about 2 million when the BBC quietly shunted the final episodes to a Sunday lunchtime slot. The show was cancelled the same year.

The honest reading is this. Series one to five are a small, likeable BBC sitcom that found a loyal tea-time audience. Series six is the cautionary tale of what happens when you try to recast a lead who is genuinely irreplaceable. I think the show would have ended with more dignity a year earlier if O'Hanlon had not been tempted back for five series in the first place, but that is a fine problem to have. The fanbase still treats five-and-done as the canonical run, and the final series as a mistake best glossed over.

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

Visually this is BBC sitcom through and through. Studio-shot, three-camera, live audience, warm sodium-lit suburban exteriors. The North London setting is lightly sketched rather than location-heavy. Costume, sets and lighting all read as tea-time comfort viewing, which is exactly the register Mendelson was aiming for.

The music is unobtrusive and the scripts move at a gentle, unhurried pace. Jokes land on a beat that feels slightly old-fashioned even for its era, and that is part of the charm. This was never supposed to compete with the sharper, crueller sitcom wave happening on Channel 4 at the same time. It was supposed to be something a family could watch together without anyone cringing. The superhero set-pieces are deliberately modest. A quick rush of wind, a cartoon whoosh, George back in the kitchen with mud on his shoes. The effects budget clearly went on tea.

🏆 Why It Works

At the height of its run, My Hero is a small piece of British comfort TV that does exactly what it says on the tin. O'Hanlon is lovely. Emily Joyce is the reason you care whether their marriage survives the latest alien mishap. Hugh Dennis and Geraldine McNulty provide a darker streak around the edges to stop the whole thing getting sickly.

The superhero-as-husband gag is not a new one. Mork & Mindy and Third Rock from the Sun got there first from the American side. What My Hero adds is a very specifically British domestic texture. Suburban respectability. The GP's surgery as a social battleground. A father-in-law who does not quite approve. A wife who mostly just wants her husband to remember to take the bins out.

In the same low-key British comedy lane as something like Still Game, though tonally warmer and less acerbic, My Hero is worth revisiting if you caught it as a kid on BBC One and wondered whether it held up. Series one to five mostly do. Series six is a skip. Treat it as five series and an epilogue nobody wanted, and it is a perfectly happy little sitcom.

Tim Wylton

Stanley Dawkins