Ben Miller (I)

After my blasting of the woefully shoddy The Omid Djalili Show, it's a totally different story on Friday night, thankfully, with Armstrong and Miller. It's good to see some solidly funny sketch comedy for a change, and this has more hits than misses. The big hit of the series are the spitfire pilots with their clipped street slang lines, and this kind of comedy isn't a million miles away from Mitchell and Webb's equally top material. In fact, Armstrong and Miller could be the reformed older brothers of the more anarchic Mitchell and Webb.

If, like Ant and Dec, you've never quite established which is which, let me clear it up for you - Alexander Armstrong is the one who did the Pimms' ads while Ben Miller was the creepy civil servant in Primeval and starred in that sitcom with Sarah Alexander, The Worst Week of My Life. After some very dubious opening titles involving dodgy dancing, there are a surprising number of funny sketches, many of them rather risque for BBC1, including splendid skewering of those 'readers emails' bits on breakfast news programmes.

When this show started, I thought we'd been transported back ten years - Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller were on the screen together, for a start, but the opening credits also seemed incredibly old-fashioned. Indeed, some would say that the very idea of a sketch show is pretty much passed its sell-by date in any case; that those sublime final Fast Show specials should have marked the genre's end.

But no, Armstrong and Miller are ploughing ahead regardless, and good on 'em. It's always hard to judge a sketch show from its first epsiode, as there'll inevitably be a few sketches which don't appeal, and some characters won't even have been introduced yet. But on the evidence we have so far, I'd give this a tentative thumbs up.

I can't pretend that the laughs were constant throughout this episode, and there were a couple of sketches which you felt you'd seen somewhere before, but when Armstrong and Miller let their imaginations run into darker territory, you could see definite potential for a successful series.

One day, some of these Perrier people will have their own TV series, like Armstrong and Miller. And one day, The Armstrong and Miller Show (C4) will be consistently funny. Armstrong and Miller inhabit that dangerous frontier land of challenging comedy - strong language, heartless jokes, ruthless parodies and media stereotypes - which is actually very agreeable, as it's familiar territory. This is comfort TV; it's what twentysomethings watch instead of Inspector Morse.

The Armstrong and Miller Show (The Paramount Channel) is wonderful character comedy, and it can't be long before Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller's first-class sketch show, currently available only on cable, is snapped up by one of the big terrestrial channels.

It's way beyond a joke

Huge is based upon Simon Godley and Ben Miller's early-1990s play of the same name. This 1993 report discusses a London run of the production.