Interview with Dan Clark

Not everyone has suffered since the economy hit the rocks - Dan Clark has thrived in How Not To Live Your Life...

Dan Clark: a likeable type

How Not to Live Your Life leapt from YouTube to the BBC. The Times ask if its star, Dan Clark, is the new Rik Mayall.

Dan Clark, who writes and stars in this, seems to have sprung from nowhere. The occasional bit-part role French And Saunders and The Mighty Boosh make up his entire CV. And yet, despite that and the fact it was on BBC3, his sitcom HNTLYL is extremely accomplished. He plays the ridiculous Dan, left a house by his Grandma, who invites the girl he fancied at school, Abby (the girl from Drop Dead Gorgeous) to be his lodger. It's a smart, quick-witted show full of cutaways, sight gags and rundowns of mistakes you shouldn't make. It also includes the sentence: "I don't believe in sheaths". Who says you need experience, eh?

I can see why people are watching and enjoying How Not To Live Your Life - it doesn't offer anything particularly new and groundbreaking, but there's some juvenile humour (hurrah!) and plenty of nice observations, and in Dan Clark BBC Three have a bit of a new poster boy. Don't even get me started on Sinead Moynihan.

Pity poor Sinead Moynihan. Okay, don't pity her too much, because she's drop dead gorgeous and clearly in demand as an actor. But it must have been galling to get the second lead in sitcom How Not to Live Your Life, only to discover that the full extent of your contribution would be to look pretty and provide a sensible foil to the show's writer/star Dan Clark. Would it have killed Clark to throw the show's only female character the occasional funny line to deliver?

This grump notwithstanding, I rather like How Not to Live Your Life. Clark stars as the self-centred, cheerfully odious Don, who inherits his grandmother's house, the debts that come with it and her live-in carer. By a twist of sitcom fate, his advert for a lodger is answered by his childhood sweetheart Abby (Moynihan), who unfortunately comes with boyfriend in tow.

Episode one was something of a slow starter, but the show hit its stride by episode two which saw child-hating Dan try and impress schoolteacher Abby by accompanying her and her class on a camping trip.

Clark's unorthodox delivery, combined with Dan's almost wilful unloveability, takes some getting used to, but this is consistently amusing, frequently hilarious and totally addictive.

Written by and starring Dan Clark as Don, this was a real hit and miss effort - with laugh out loud lines interspersed with behaviour by Don that left you wishing someone would give him a bloody good hammering. We'll probably give it a second chance.

August is when TV companies bury the shows they have no faith in. Which is the only possible explanation for BBC3 to try to slip the excruciating How Not To Live Your Life past us. It's a showcase for the comedy talents of writer/star Dan Clark. Which would be fine if he had any.

To distract myself from this excuse for a sitcom in which Cark, who looks 30, behaves like a charm-free hormonally rampant teenager, I tried to work out who he looked like. Finally, I cracked it - Jason Merrells from Cutting It. You're really in trouble when even your lookalike isn't interesting.

BBC Interview

The BBC News website interviews Dan Clark about his new sitcom.

Time Out Interview

Dan Clark tells Time Out how not to make a bad sitcom.

Hurrah - yet another comedy series gets a chance to stretch its legs on BBC Three. This offering, penned by star Dan Clark, follows the fortunes of Don. He's your average neurotic singleton who spends his days trying to make a sense of ordinary life.