Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong are a writing team garlanded with awards for their work on edgy comedies like The Thick of It and Peep Show. They also co-wrote the film Four Lions, Chris Morris's black comedy about suicide bombers. It might seem a far cry from Four Lions to two old codgers, but Bain and Armstrong's likeable sitcom about an ageing pair of ill-matched blokes has the same vein of recognisable absurdity running through it as all their best stuff. As we rejoin Roy (Clive Swift) and Tom (Roger Lloyd Pack), in an episode written by Simon Blackwell, they are eating olives and rice cakes for breakfast while arguing about whose turn it is to do the shopping. The fact that male hopelessness in everything from shopping to romance remains as much a problem in age as in youth is a joke the series plays off well. The pair are still clumsily besotted with their neighbour Sally (Jane Asher) and concerned that she has a new boyfriend ("She keeps going out with men who aren't even remotely us," moans Tom). But now there's a new distraction - a stylish librarian, Barbara, played by Cherie Lunghi.

The sitcom shuffles into a second series but if you're coming at it new, prepare yourself for a world that's a lot less subtle than that more famous creation from writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Peep Show. The flaw this opener shows up is that the dialogue doesn't seem to sit right coming out of the mouths of the show's aged housemates. Still, we're in the safe hands of comic veterans Roger Lloyd Pack and Clive Swift of Keeping Up Appearances.

Moved to a new home on Friday nights, where it's much-needed, the second series of The Old Guys feels as comfortable as a pair of slippers.

Ironically, the first series suffered from the fact that it was created by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. Their fans would have been expecting Peep Show for pensioners - and it certainly wasn't that.

It was more like Men Behaving Badly meets One Foot In The Grave. Its sense of humour might be cutting but it could never be described as cutting-edge, and it wasn't trying to be. It was safe, cosy and non-threatening - aimed firmly at the kind of viewers who loved Clive Swift as Hyacinth's husband in Keeping Up Appearances.

Series two finds Swift and Roger Lloyd Pack's flat-sharing Old Couple still lusting after their sexy but oblivious neighbour Sally (Jane Asher) and dismayed that she's found "another bloody boyfriend who isn't us". But there's a new woman on the scene - a librarian, played (improbable as it sounds) by Cherie Lunghi. You can already start to see Jane Asher's glamorous hackles rise and having a bit of competition (even for two men she's not remotely interested in) should put the cat among the pigeons.

This week Tom and Roy enter a pub quiz to prove that age hasn't shrunk their brain cells. And Tom's quest continues to underline how even though they might both be old, he's not as old as Roy. "You did National Service in Caterham," he points out. "I did acid in Wardour Street."

It may be Pensioners Behaving Badly, but I found the first series of this comedy from the writers behind Peep Show (predominantly Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, with this first episode written by Simon Blackwell) more enjoyable than the concept would indicate. Roger Lloyd Pack and Clive Swift bicker about everything, not least their mutual attraction to neighbour Sally (Jane Asher).

The Old Guys Review

The rather conventional sitcom starring Roger Lloyd-Pack and Clive Swift didn't cause too many ripples when it debuted last year, but it's receiving a fair bit of hype this time round. For the most part, this hype is deserved.

It's not hard to find fault with The Old Guys: the female characters don't quite work; the scrapes that odd-couple pensioners Tom and Roy get into feel laboured; and often it's just not funny enough. But sometimes it very much is, and Roger Lloyd Pack's performance as Tom shows signs of becoming a bit special. Tom's self-image as a hip old cat with a colourful past (much of it, we suspect, imaginary) plays well against Clive Swift as the strait-laced Roy.

The Old Guys look like they're starting to gel - just in time for a second series, perhaps?

The old guys in The Old Guys are engaged in a sedate but still desperate competition to appear less old than they are, and, specifically, less old than each other. In the first of this new sitcom, the pair institute a competition to prove which has the stronger bladder. Caught short at their neighbour Sally's party, Tom and Roy end up peeing in her kitchen sink. Fortunately they get away with this and no one notices. Oh, no they don't! Sally discovers them mid-leak. Reaction shot. Cue music, applause and credits.

I was hoping for a little more from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the creators of the blissful Peep Show. But although their subject is age, this is a piece of juvenilia, brought to the screen many years after its first drafts. Happily for us, but sadly for the show, comedy has moved on in the meantime. Thanks to Peep Show, among other programmes, it is now twice as hard to make work a multicamera, two-set sitcom, videoed in front of a live audience. Thanks also to Peep Show, we expect comedy characterisation to go deeper than tired divisions between tidy and slobby, introvert and extrovert. At the moment, the best ways to read nuance into the pair is to imagine that Tom, played as a decayed but still snobbish student by Roger Lloyd Pack, is an older version of Peep Show's Jeremy. That would make Clive Swift's Roy, for whom a cravat is never out of the question, Mark.

There's more realism in The Old Guys than Not Going Out, within the comic boundaries that allow characters to bet on holding off going to the toilet and then when becoming desperate, decide to go in the kitchen sink, whereupon they are caught by an entire party of guests. But at least the leads, Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger in Only Fools And Horses) and Clive Swift (Richard in Keeping Up Appearances) are very experienced actors who make their performances seem natural.

It's written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who also write the brilliant Peep Show, and the lazy description is that the old guys are Mark and Jeremy grown older but no wiser. The odd couple - conventional guy, crazy guy - is such a perennial set up because it works, but while this ticked along pleasantly, the jokes just didn't seem to be there.

Of course, BBC Scotland already has another pensioner sitcom in Still Game, which has a sense of place and a specific culture to play off that, so far, The Old Guys lacks.

Sound the trumpets: it's a new sitcom from writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the team behind Channel 4's wonderful, Bafta-winning Peep Show. And they haven't strayed far from that show's premise: two blokes living together and getting on each other's nerves. The difference is age - this is Peep Show crossed with One Foot in the Grave, if you like.

Tom (Roger Lloyd-Pack) is a feckless baby-boomer, who has never quite left the 60s behind; Roy (Clive Swift) is more the old-style suburban pensioner. Their banter revolves around who will get Alzheimer's first, whose bladder is stronger and who has the better chance with glamorous neighbour Sally (Jane Asher).

The writing is as sharp as you'd expect and the performances might just gel into something special.

A new sitcom by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the writers of Channel 4's excellent if uncomfortably dark Peep Show. Their new creation - which is about the misadventures of two elderly friends, played by Roger Lloyd Pack and Clive Swift - is warmer, but anarchic none the less.