BCG Daily Saturday 13th November 2010

Todd Margaret is TV's latest bad boss

As new sitcom The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret debuts on More4, former management consultant David Craig assesses TV's management gurus.

The recipe for sitcom success

Miranda writer James Cary on his unfailsafe recipe for creating a sitcom.

Ben Elton signs deal with Channel 9

He's been flying under the radar in Fremantle, but Confidential can reveal comic maestro Ben Elton has signed a lucrative deal with Channel 9 to host a new program and will now make WA his official home.

TV review: Misfits

Teens, superpowers, lots of talk about shagging and cheerful swearing: clearly not a show to appeal to everyone. But hang on, they didn't win that Best Drama Bafta by accident.

Getting On review

Getting On would seem to scotch any lingering prejudice that women are less funny than men. Principals Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicky Pepperdine also wrote the partly ad-libbed show, and bring to life a comedy of the half-resented, half-generous sacrifices of dedication.

Brand plays nursing auxiliary Kim, supervised by Scanlan as Sister Den Flixter; both engage in constant half-cock skirmishes with consultant Pippa Moore (Pepperdine). The show has grasped and exploits a deeper-than-surface reality: that the health service, shorn of a chain of clear command, is a place of overlapping baronies that must bargain with each other for time and resources.

Thus, in last week's episode, Kim has Sister Den assigned to assist her as a moonlighting agency nurse in the middle of the night - and the two struggle over who has the right to give orders.

At the same time, Dr Moore seeks Kim's aid as a witness to an "inappropriate incident" earlier and is stymied because Kim "doesn't like legal things". Where "do it because I say so" is absent, a low-level insubordination, which is also an assertion of dignity, spreads like a fungus - and in that is the comedy.

Meet The Doyles is not at all funny

An audience member blogs about watching the show being recorded: "That's four hours of my life that I'll never get back. And it seemed a lot longer than that at the time."