Laughs dry up for spouse-proud Reeves - is his career suffering from trying to help his wife make it?
He's endured a long spell of TV mediocrity and, later this month, Vic Reeves will once again be returning to our screens with his partner.
In fact, the comic will be back with both his partners. Side-kick Bob Mortimer will be on board for Monkey Trousers on ITV1 but so, too, will blonde former underwear model Nancy Sorrell.
These days, it seems, you are unlikely to see 46-year-old Vic, real name Jim Moir, perform without his beloved wife of two years.
Switch over to the Discovery Channel and you'll find the pair appearing in a Vic-penned series, Rogues Gallery.
While he plays some of history's most notorious criminals, Nancy's fair bosom is laced tightly into corsets to play a pirate's wife and a stagecoach passenger, opposite Vic's Blue Beard and Dick Turpin.
Cutting-edge TV it isn't. In fact, as Vic tries to compensate for his wife's thespian deficiencies, the effect is often toe-curling.
It comes as no surprise, then, that media observers are getting twitchy at Vic's apparent conviction that he can remould the former Ann Summers model as his comic partner.
"It's all getting a bit like John Lennon and Yoko Ono," says one. "Nancy may be a wonderful wife but a great comic actress she isn't. There's a danger that Vic will become discredited if he persists in following this route." While Vic has happily admitted "it's grand, nepotism," he believes his wife's talent justifies it. Nancy, of course, shares his belief.
"I'm in the same business as Jim," she has said. "I worked with famous people long before he was on the scene. On the Graham Norton show, for instance, I escorted David Hasselhoff down the stairs in my bunny-girl outfit..."
Alarm bells rang last autumn, when Vic appeared on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
While it's understandable that ex-Stringfellows dancer Nancy might want to be on a show with desperate D-list celebs, Vic, as an established star, could hardly be said to have needed such publicity.
Unsurprisingly, the couple's loved-up behaviour proved a turn-off and viewers swiftly voted them out.
But instead of realising their double act could be professional suicide, there was more publicity to be garnered for his wife, this time with a shoot for Hello! magazine.
V IC, it seems, has a blind spot when it comes to Nancy, which may have something to do with the fact that he met her when his male ego had crashed to rock bottom.
His marriage to Sarah Vincent had broken down after she had affairs with another man and then another woman.
Vic, the son of a linotype operator and a seamstress, then found love with actress Emilia Fox. They got engaged and Vic and Emilia and Sarah and her lesbian lover set up home with Vic and Sarah's children, Alice and Louis.
It didn't last. Emilia called off the engagement, saying Vic was too hard to live with, and Sarah headed north to set up home. In the aftermath of this, Vic met Nancy in 2001, on the set of the BBC show I Love 1991. It must have seemed hard to believe that the beautiful bubbly blonde was really attracted to him.
He engineered a second meeting by inviting her to appear on Shooting Stars three months later - something she described as the "biggest thrill".
The following February, he proposed at London's Groucho Club, going down on one knee and singing The Very Thought Of You to her.
At the time, Nancy, who also once dated Paul Gascoigne, said: "Vic is everything to me - he's kind, caring and fun. We are soulmates."
Former boss Peter Stringfellow once said: "She likes famous guys and harboured a desire to be famous but she wasn't sure how to achieve it."
Nancy was born in middle-class comfort in Chigwell, Essex, the daughter of Bank of England manager Ronald and former model Kathleen.
She left a local comprehensive with eight GCSEs, worked as a secretary, signed up to modelling agency Models Plus and appeared in her underwear in a tabloid newspaper agony aunt strip.
Then she became a dancer before, in 1995, landing a small part in the comedy spoof news show The Day Today.
It was there that she met comic Steve Coogan and embarked on an affair. When it ended, she sold her story to a newspaper, giving graphic details of the occasion she made love to Coogan on a cash-covered bed.
None of this mattered to Vic. In his eyes, Nancy's love rescued him from the sadness of the past.
"She understood me and that's rare in my experience," he later recalled. "People also ask what attracted me to Nancy, as if she's a mere sex object. It was her mind."
T HEIR starry, showbiz wedding, in January 2003, provided yet another opportunity for publicity - the coverage by Hello! earned £500,000.
Soon Vic was focusing on joint projects. One show he put together for Five was called Vic Reeves Is Stupid. A TV source is alleged to have said: "It was awful. They should have called it Nancy Sorrell is Crap And Vic Reeves Is Stupid." Needless to say, it was never shown.
But such episodes have done nothing to stop Vic's drive to make his wife a star - even at the expense of his own reputation.
Late last year, he revealed that the BBC had snubbed his plans for a weekend show with Bob Mortimer. "We've offered ideas but nobody has said anything," he moaned.
Though Vic and Bob remain a partnership, it's debatable whether they can recapture the brilliance of past hits Shooting Stars and Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased).
Churchill: The Hollywood Years, a film in which both men star, was panned and their BBC3 comedy drama, Catterick, was also a flop.
Monkey Trousers may return them to their rightful place as the modern-day Morecambe and Wise but much depends on Vic.
And the millions of viewers who witnessed his genius at its height will hope he regains his comic touch.
"Nancy is like an expensive jewel," he mused recently. "I just sit and look at her because she's so beautiful and precious, the way nature intended..."
She may be the balm that soothes the painful wounds of the past but if Vic is to endure as one of Britain's best-loved funny-men, he must learn to believe in himself again.
Mirror
