Can football and sitcom ever mix?

No sooner had the extended Premier League season ended than another footballing story started. You might not have noticed, but Apple TV's culture-clash sitcom Ted Lasso, about an American NFL coach with no soccer experience taking over at a Premier League team, began over the weekend. It arrived to a pretty muted response. It's not the only footy sitcom we have seen this year. Inbetweeners writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris's disappointing The First Team had some distinctly lower-midtable reviews for the BBC. It's something of a trend that, whenever the sit of the com is in a football club, the laughs are hard to find. Mike Bassett: Manager lasted a series, The Cup and Warren United have tried it too, but none of them quite worked.

It's been good-natured if not slap-your-sides funny series.

Undermining its mockumentary format with telegraphed jokes and sitcom cliches (this week: the hilarity of Brummie accents) The Cup pales in comparison with The Office, but still manages a few neatly hit moments.

So ogreish are the characters that there's absolutely no point buying into them. If there are moments of heart, they're buried so deep that you basically couldn't care less about what happened to them. The main character (whose name I can't even be bothered to learn) is such a dick, that you find yourself willing ill toward him. It's not that he's a 'bit sad' or 'cares too much'... he's just... a dick. And who really wants to hang around with dicks?

The comic strangeness was prevalent in The Wrong Door, a sketch show that relied heavily on technical and CGI trickery. One very funny sketch featured a group of sprites escaping from a bottle and making a poor drunken fool's life that much more horrible by texting a malicious message to his girlfriend and framing him for watching hotel porn.

One young woman was dating a dinosaur, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, who visits her parents' home and destroys everything within, including eating the family dog. A robot stomps over London asking where it left its house keys, destroying swaths of the metropolis. The show is hit and miss - Superhero Tryouts, an X Factor for wannabe superheroes, was laboured and directionless - but the writers Ben Wheatley and Jack Cheshire (who also direct and produce) have at least originated a novel and bizarre show.

Their strangest creation, and the most brilliantly maddening, is a scientist's unfortunately successful attempt to create a new life form. Somehow a malformed DNA structure means that this creature is the most irritating thing on the planet. The scientists hate it. We hate it. This creature destroys everything it touches, but only after wheedling, pleading and manipulating. Are we there yet? it repeats. Eventually, the guy who took the creature in drove at a post to end it all.

Episode two of this fly-on-the-wall mockumentary about coaching an under-11s football team, and it's still difficult to see its point. If this is just entertainment, then its well-observed dialogue can sometimes make it feel very clever. I can't believe you started a fight in front of the kids, one aspiring coach is told. You don't get anything without a fight in this life, he replies in perfect soccer cliché. But there's the nagging feeling that the writers are striving towards a greater significance - unfortunately, it's unclear what that might be, beyond the truism that adults' behaviour is often more juvenile than that of their children.

This 'sitcom' about a dad obsessed with his son's football team was almost insultingly bad.

The series utilises a 'mockumentary' approach that owes a very heavy debt to The Office (although this series has been adapted from a Canadaian series called The Tournament). This does it no favours at all. Where The Office was realistic, understated, intelligent and subtle, The Cup is unrealistic, over the top and, to put it bluntly, stupid.

The BBC probably thinks it's on to a winner with The Cup, a new 'comedy' filmed in a docu-style that follows the fictional under-11s football side Ashburn United in their quest for glory. Sadly, the Beeb should note that last night's opening episode failed to live up to the hype, following in the footsteps of 2007's FA Cup final when Chelsea played Manchester United in a p*** poor match at Wembley.

The creators of The Office might well hold their heads in shame because their success could be blamed for spawning all these 'reality' comedies, which persist in following 'real people' (that would be actors) as they ape human emotions. In The Cup's case, the characters are so unlikeable, it's like watching ten David Brents awkwardly careering across the screen.

The producers must have believed they had the perfect blend: a reality comedy about football. Genius. Yet it's packed so full of cliches, it's hard to care. Bossy woman? Aggressive football coach? Pushy dad? Tick, tick and tick.

The dominating desperado dad, Terry (Steve Edge), was 'living his dream through his son' as he became more and more childish in his behaviour. This appeared to be the constant joke, that the adults' actions were constantly more juvenile than those of their children. The score, at the end of the day, was: BBC 0, Viewers 0.

The Cup tries hard to be The Office of the football field, using the same makey-uppy documentary device. Nothing wrong with that - it's a good way of getting to know characters quickly without forcing plot lines, although here it doesn't feel as fresh as when Ricky Gervais was doing it. And there are some decent performances, although Steve Edge as main man Terry stands out a bit too far perhaps. His character, a super-competitive footballing dad, is not just in your face, he's rammed right down your throat. Subtle this isn't, and that's the problem.

The Times Review

The prospects for The Cup do not look good: before the first episode the critics' knives were heartily slashing away at its past-it mockumentary style. Is it that bad? OK, it's not The Office (and really, the mockumentary should have died back then, in a blaze of rousing, nation-conquering glory). But The Cup has its charm. It is set, as all these things about salt-of-the-earth types are, in the North where people have common sense and are down to earth, away from us flibbertigibbets with feta cheese and soulless apartments in the South.