Frasier reboot review: If you guys ruin this I’ll be the one needing therapy

Grammer has risked tampering with his show’s gilded status as one of TV’s greatest

"Hey baby I hear the blues a-callin' ... " Kelsey Grammer returns as Frasier

Those wide-set shoulders suggested the hanger was still inside the jacket. Those ten-to-two feet - Chaplinesque - should have provided balance. But basic movement was so unpredictable that, never mind the hanger, he sometimes looked like he was struggling to shift an imaginary wardrobe.

It was one of the all-time, solid-gold classic comedy walks and - “Oh, dear God!” - here it is again. Bumbling through airport arrivals at Boston, Kelsey Grammer is back as Dr Frasier Crane. Everyone’s favourite pretentious psychiatrist couldn’t stop meddling. Now Grammer has risked tampering with his show’s gilded status as one of TV’s greatest, of any kind.

Many fans will have required therapy since learning that Nicholas Lyndhurst was joining. As someone who had a blind spot about Only Fools and Horses, I was one of them. Rodney Trotter replacing Frasier’s brother Niles? How was that ever going to match the glorious, big-brained-baby bickering of Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, who’s ducked out of this revival?

It’s a different relationship, obviously - not siblings but professorial colleagues at Harvard. Presumably, though, similar riffola was anticipated, Frasier going off on one like in his beloved jazz and Lyndhurst’s Alan Cornwall responding. In the first episode there’s none of this. Maybe later. For can you honestly remember the show’s beginnings back in 1993 promising such high-end, high-wire wordplay, all that tossed salad and scrambled eggs?

This was always a terrific ensemble comedy, so who’s new? Since last encountered, Frasier had moved from Seattle to Chicago, and had only intended Boston to be a stop-off en route to Paris for research for a book. But he gets waylaid. By Cornwall (bit of a tweedy English academic cliche, possibly a functioning alcoholic). By Cornwall’s boss Olivia Finch (sarcastic, formidable, sample quotes: “No is just a yes in a trenchcoat … Men are afraid of smart women.”). And I was about to say his son Freddie, but it’s Frasier who waylays him, barges back into his life, trying to bond, determined - finally - to become a good dad.

Presumably it’s the passing of his own father Martin - John Mahoney, who played the craggy ex-cop, died in 2018 - which is the motivation here. This relationship, starting as a non-relationship, looks like being key. Similarly to Martin, Freddie, played by Jack Cutmore-Scott, has a proper job - firefighter - and a nice line in sarcastic ripostes (Frasier, trying to justify his shrink work: “What I do is just as important!” Freddie: “Okay, let’s find someone with low self-esteem who is also on fire and see which of us they run to first!”).

There’s David - Niles and Daphne’s son - and Eve, a waitress/actress who was taken in with her baby by Freddie following the death of a fellow firefighter in a blaze. The opener ends with them discovering who’s just bought the apartment across the hall (I’m sure you can guess).

So that’s the set-up. Frasier admits to mixed emotions being back in Boston (“I may have spent a little too much time in a certain bar,” he says, meaning Cheers of course) and I have them too regarding the reboot. The final shot is an old clip of Mahoney sat in his favourite mangy armchair. “It all works out,” he says. I really hope it does.