Review, Mock The Week, BBC2

"I hate people who phone me up just to complain about the weather, which is how I lost my job with mountain rescue." - Gary Delaney.

Hugh Dennis expects Outnumbered specials

Hugh Dennis reckons Outnumbered will return for a number of special episodes.

Radio Times review

When this show first aired ten years ago - back when Twitter didn't exist, David Cameron was Shadow Education Secretary and Andy Murray was outside the world's top 400 - it didn't look like much. Yet another panel show, and an unprepossessing mix of Have I Got News for You and Whose Line Is It Anyway? to boot - surely it wouldn't go on to be one of TV comedy's most reliable ratings bankers?

Well, it did - and now it's back for a triumphant 14th series, with Dara O Briain still in charge and a roster of strong comics, old and new: Katherine Ryan, James Acaster, Matt Forde and Josh Widdicombe join hoary regulars Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons.

With three days to go before polling day, we can presumably expect events in the election battle bus sitcom to grow ever more frenetic. But in a controlled way, because Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin perfected the knack of dropping topical material into the mix at the last moment back in their days writing Drop The Dead Donkey; while the likes of Hugh Dennis, Ben Miller and Sarah Hadland can be relied on not to fluff their lines. Continues and concludes tomorrow and Wednesday.

Hugh Dennis interview

Sometimes I do think that politicians are only in it for themselves, but actually as I've got older I've started to feel less cynical about them.

Ballot Monkeys was sharp, as would befit a writing credit for Andy Hamilton, and thus trumped and trumps ITV's Newzoids so far. Again served by a great ensemble, it was hampered only by being so close not only to topicality but to truth. Stronger, Fairer, Nicer is the slogan on the Lib-Dem battle bus and a blistering Ben Miller couldn't better negate any of those adjectives. The Tory bus has Hugh Dennis as the head of something involving "delivery", although you were invited to set your watches back to 1954 as a bereft "women's spokesman" had to crane her neck against the bus-rack just to be heard past his dullard alpha shoulders. Labour? Just constantly worried about the reaction on the doorstep to happy warrior Miliband. Andy Nyman's Ukip press officer is not so much fighting Twitter storms - most of them engendered by the bus's other occupants - as engaged in a Sisyphean bout of Whack-a-Mole. If only politics could be this much fun. If only Labour hadn't sold everyone down the river. Adapted to the paradigm contiguities of a modern vibrant age. Sold everyone down the river.