Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair's bitter-hearted comedy enters its third season and seems to have found its feet. We return to find Magda, the wonderfully sullen Polish help, has moved in until her boiler is fixed.

Jack back with Lead Balloon

Comedian Jack Dee is back on TV for a third series of his sitcom, Lead Balloon. The Press And Journal finds out how similar he is to the character, Rick Spleen, and asks what his children think of his comedy projects.

Once again, Jack Dee gets that sinking feeling

As Jack Dee returns for a new series of Lead Balloon, he tells The Telegraph about being miserable and getting that sinking feeling.

Jack Dee Interview

TV Scoop interviewed the star of the show in the run up to the third series.

Sadly for Jack Dee, he's created a character that is impossible to side with. Look at David Brent for example. He's odious, stupid and distasteful... but somewhere, underneath all that hideousness lies a heart. Where Brent clearly wants to please everyone all the time, Dee's Spleen is, in short, a horrible human being.

Jack Dee's back with a second series of his (written with Pete Sinclair) hugely enjoyable BBC2 sitcom Lead Balloon.

Dee's portrayal of cantankerous, middle-aged comedian Rick Spleen has more than a touch of a media-class Tony Hancock to it - a character whose talent for digging himself into holes is second only to a grave-digger's.

One of the main joys of Lead Balloon is its small cast of supporting characters, comprising Rick's supremely patient wife (Raquel Cassidy), staggeringly vague daughter Sam (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), their permanently unheppy Polish home help Magda (brilliantly played by Anna Crilly) and his far-smarter co-writer Marty (Sean Power).

Even as minor a role as over-familiar local cafe owner Michael (Tony Gardner) is a perfectly formed, fully drawn character.

Every one of them was on top form, producing a just about flawless half hour of delightfully miserablist comedy. Lead Balloon is sure to go down well again this winter.

I'm not an interesting celebrity

The Guardian meets Jack Dee to talk about series two of Lead Balloon.

Frank Skinner said his favourite sitcom of the moment was Jack Dee's Lead Balloon. A surprising choice, perhaps, because it had more of an impact on BBC4 than it did when it transferred to BBC2, and suffered from comparisons with Curb Your Enthusiasm?

Nonsense, said Skinner. It's the best sitcom that anyone from the comedy circuit has done, obviously I was hoping it would be shit.

Not quite heaven

I know comedy is very much a matter of personal taste, therefore very rarely brings in big ratings and as a consequence gets pushed to the periphery of the mainstream schedules, hence the late scheduling of TV Heaven, Telly Hell, though how it ever got a second series is a bit of a mystery.

The format clearly doesn't work, while Sean Lock not only continues to look uncomfortable and unfunny, but this week he managed to do the almost impossible by sharing a show with Jack Dee that I found it very difficult to laugh at.

Merely showing old clips of bad telly and then commenting on them seems last at the best times and the whole thing really does come across as an ill-conceived rip off of Room 101. The only thing remotely interesting about the whole exercise was the sight of Brain Blessed's deformed-looking foot in a clip from City Hospital.

A handy hint: if you are going to make a television show that exists to extract the urine from other productions, you should at the very least ensure that your show isn't worse than those you're mocking.

With Jack Dee making a perfect grouchy everyman and his long suffering family and small circle of 'friends' providing amiable foils for his general moans and mishaps, Lead Balloon goes down really well, despite the show's name.

The squirm factor is not quite as strong as with Curb Your Enthusiasm but this low-key sitcom is shot like a drama without a laugh track and while the dialogue and acting feel improvised, the plots are relatively tightly planned out to reach a specific conclusion.