Preview: The Windsors

The Windsors isn't going to win any awards for subtlety and the writers certainly aren't going to win any knighthoods, but if you like seeing royal poshos royally sent up this should put a smile on your face.

Radio Times review

PR wonk Siobhan Sharpe is in full, incomprehensible, short-circuiting robot mode as the management team discuss the launch of BBC Better: "You might want to buy into, like, the idea of major s***. We've got to pre-sell the movie rights."

It's a brilliant set piece of double-think, in an organisation where W1A writer John Morton suggests that people shall speak nonsense to other people. No one does it better than Sharpe (Jessica Hynes) and dear, dim intern Will "Yeah, sure, yeah, cool" Humphries (Hugh Skinner, a hoot), who wanders the floors of New Broadcasting House looking like a puzzled horse.

Meanwhile, Anna Rampton, the new Head of Better, doesn't want a picture of Lord Reith in her new office because he's "too frightening".

A strange solo outing for Guy Jenkin, co-writer of Ballot Monkeys. On an RAF base in the British countryside, a squadron who used to fly bombers in Afghanistan now sit controlling drones. In this, er, pilot episode, a hit on a high-profile jihadi turns bad, and it all goes a bit Thick of It as the details leak out. Can comedy flow from such a dark and airless subject? Vincent Franklin, Rufus Jones and a particularly fine Hugh Skinner - a dashing toff here, instead of his dim one in W1A - lead what proves to be a hopeless mission.

Radio Times review

A great cast - Vincent Franklin from Cucumber, Hugh Skinner (dumb Will in W1A), and Rufus Jones (camp David, also in W1A) do their best in this queasy sitcom about drone pilots.

The bored little group are closeted in a cabin on a bleak airfield, their days characterised by long stretches of yawning boredom punctuated by administering sudden death in the Middle East, and sometimes they get it wrong.

It's a black comedy (there's a very off-colour gag about social services) but it's not black enough and consequently not funny enough. It's the kind of thing Charlie Brooker would do ruthlessly well, yet writer Guy Jenkin (Ballot Monkeys and Drop the Dead Donkey) lets it drift into farce.

Video - W1A: Back to poke fun at the Beeb

It's the "mockumentary" which does not need to aim far to hit its target. W1A is a comedy which satirises the BBC, and it's back for a second series, which starts tonight on BBC Two at 9pm. BBC Breakfast was joined by two of its stars, Hugh Skinner and Rufus Jones.

W1A continued to do what it had done before, but it was still very funny. As the amiably bumbling intern Will, Hugh Skinner mastered the art of putting his verbal tics together into complete arias. "Cool, yeah, no worries, yeah, cool." Then the reality of his own personality suddenly became clear to him. "Sometimes I'm completely useless." But he was never aware for long of his own limitless potential for chaos.

In Will's continuing struggle to match the envelopes with the invitations, the invitation for David Cameron turned out to be in the envelope addressed to the Prince of Wales. Then the envelope addressed to David Cameron turned out to contain an invitation to Joan Bakewell. I hope I got that right. Will, of course, had no such hopes until too late. The show was a hoot like the voice of Siobhan Sharpe, but let's not forget that the Beeb is really like that.

The teaming of Fletcher and Sharpe was one of Twenty Twelve's greatest assets due to the fact that they are incredibly mismatched. Although W1A doesn't have quite the spark that Twenty Twelve possessed it still rings true due to its fantastically accurate script. Once again Hugh Bonneville's Fletcher is our baffled guide to a world of shared working space and company jargon that he struggles to understand.

I believe that Siobhan Sharpe is one of the greatest comedy creations of the last decade, partly due to the delightfully zany performance from Jessica Hynes. Some of my new favourite characters in W1A include Monica Dolan's Welsh Communications Officer Tracey Prichard and Hugh Skinner's befuddled intern Will.

The fact W1A has already had some quite big names in cameo roles means that it's definitely a sitcom that BBC is passionate about promoting. I just hope it finds an audience as, judging by the first two episodes, this is a genuinely funny series that shows that the BBC does have a sense of humour about itself.