BBC2
After a lot of fairly trad sitcoms the latest pilot in the BBC's current raft of newbies is a sketch show. And although it is new Famalam feels like it has been around for a while. In both a good and bad way.
W1A returns and hits the ground running. The BBC is up for charter renewal and so these are tense times for the corporation and it needs people like Head of Values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) to steady the ship, stop it from hitting an iceberg and/or sinking etc, etc.
So is it third time lucky then? After The Nightly Show and Host The Week could TV 2017 crack the seemingly simple concept of a topical show? The Mash Report is slightly different from those other two examples, which were part-chat and part-impro respectively. The role model here was probably The Daily Show with a bit of John Oliver for good measure. Pretty ambitious and, so far, flawed but pretty good.
I’ve been a fan of Inside No 9 since it started and it has maintained its high standards right through to this, the final show of the third series. Private View is set in a subterranean East London art gallery where artist Elliot Quinn his hosting, appropriately, his final show, entitled Fragments.
How kind of the BBC to save the sitcom pilot with the most potential until last. They probably realised that something written by Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan* alongside - and no disrespect meant to them at all - Helen Linehan and Holly Walsh would be a tough half hour to follow. And sure enough Motherland hits the sitcom motherlode.
Is it possible for a sitcom to be terrible and very funny at the same time? That’s the feat that this one-off revival of Goodnight Sweetheart as part of the Landmark Sitcom Season seems to have pulled off. This time travel comedy always was an odd idea and the internal logic problems of the original run, which ended 17 years ago, still haven’t been resolved. On the other hand there are plenty of laughs.
Cradle to Grave is based on Danny Baker’s autobiography, but the inspiration for part of the humour in the fourth episode involving the school soccer team seems to have come from somewhere else altogether…
The latest instalment features a shouty, win-at-all-costs northern track-suited trainer called Mr Glover (played by John Henshaw). There is a distinct whiff of Kes here. Maybe it’s a bizarre coincidence or maybe it's a homage, but the trainer in Kes was played by a Mr Glover. Mr Brian Glover.
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