It’s great to report that the first episode of Upstart Crow was not a fluke. Writer Ben Elton repeats the trick again in the second episode. In fact if there is a problem here it isn't so much that this week’s episode is like Blackadder, it’s more a case that it is too much like last week’s episode.

Once again Shakespeare (David Mitchell) is struggling to make it as a playwright, with his family ganging up on him for being pretentious and the toffs looking down on him for being a "country bumsnot". Class seems to be a running gag on this series – this week there’s an aside about Oxbridge posh boys running everything, which could apply to comedy, though I think Ben Elton is referring to government.

And once again Spencer Jones as smug actor Will Kempe does his smug Ricky Gervais impression. Having said that it is very funny and might get even funnier by sheer force of repetition. A few gags are a touch creaky - our hero is working on something new called The Merchant of Guildford but feels it needs more work – but there are enough strong lines to keep your attention.

The wannabe Bard’s main problem this week revolves around writing a play to suck up to the royals, which is pretty much what Shakespeare did with his history plays. Along the way he meets up with the distinctly more dashing Christopher Marlowe – played by Tim Downie, who has to exert considerable will power not to slap his thigh and thrust his groin out, Flashheart style.

So yes, there are those inevitable echoes of Blackadder too. Funnily enough I was recently watching the Blackadder III episode when Johnson’s dictionary is destroyed and there is a loosely similar moment with one of Shakespeare’s manuscripts here. 

But the pedantic comparisons don’t really matter. Thanks to a decent script and some terrific performances from David Mitchell’s put-upon playwright to Mark Heap’s OTT Sir Robert Greene and all the others this is bags of fun. I wish Elton didn’t overuse the idea of adding “ington” to words to make them an insult (“grumpy little bitchington”) but it might just catch on.