![Changing Ends features a star-making performance from remarkable talent Oliver Savell](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000384533044_17207993367320_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwSX5rhseiWKOo9p9OQ-ymek.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Changing Ends, series 2, review: wonderkid Savell makes Alan Carr’s second season a winner
Oliver Savell, who plays the young Carr, is a remarkable comic talent, and this poignant series is the breath of fresh air TV comedy needed
![Changing Ends features a star-making performance from remarkable talent Oliver Savell](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000384533044_17207993367320_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwSX5rhseiWKOo9p9OQ-ymek.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Football is no joke. Unless, maybe it is if you’re a 12-year-old boy growing up in 1980s Northampton, your dad is the manager of the local league side and you’re more into Angela Lansbury than square back fours. Then, well, football is a load of old cobblers.
How good is it to welcome back Changing Ends (ITV1), the comedy memoir fashioned from the wonky childhood memories of comedian Alan Carr, whose Dad was indeed the manager of Northampton’s Cobblers. Built around a star-making performance from remarkable talent Oliver Savell as the young Alan, the first season kicked new life into the struggling sitcom genre.
As any manager knows you don’t change a winning formation when you’re ahead, so season two wisely plays to the strengths it showed first time round. Young Savell’s uncanny evocation of what we imagine a young Alan must have been like is so convincing it’s almost like we’re somehow watching Carr himself.
![Shaun Dooley and Nancy Sullivan play Alan's loving but slightly bemused parents](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000384533879_17207993591320_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqc_wx8HP7haHfu1TOAdP2DnwSCF1R0VweJ7DS2UnVMSQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Savell never misses a comedy beat, scoring laugh-out-loud moments from goalie gloves, knicker nicking, rocking caravans and anything else the nostalgia-strewn script throws at him. He’s so good, nailing Carr’s camp intonation to perfection, that whenever he’s off screen the light dims a little.
But sitcoms are a team game and Shaun Dooley and Nancy Sullivan make a perfect pair of wing backs as Alan’s loving but slightly bemused parents. There are cherishable cameos from Cariad Lloyd as delightfully delusional drama teacher Miss Gideon and Dotty Davies (another young talent to watch) as Alan’s girlfriend-in-waiting, brainy Kay. Boy, was her radar ever off.
This was likely a tough series to make, given the death last year of Simon Carlyle, who co-created Changing Ends with Carr. One episode, centred on the not altogether welcome visit of Alan’s grandma (played with a nice line in passive-aggressive bile by comedy veteran Maggie Steed) owes a big debt to Two Doors Down, another of Carlyle’s creations. It plays like a tribute and feels like a slight mis-step as the pace slackens. Changing Ends is all about quick one-twos and hits the spot best when it portrays characters who are worlds apart but who love each other anyway.
All episodes of Changing Ends are available on ITVX now