John Finnemore

I can recommend an excellent new comedy from Radio 4: Cabin Pressure, about the trials and misfortunes of a budget airline. Well, not really an airline, as the company's supremo Carolyn explains to her hapless captain, for you cannot arrange one plane in a line. 'If anything, it's an airdot.' This show makes great use of both the misery of failure and the mystery of flying. (There is an excellent running joke about how no one really knows how planes stay in the air.) I cannot find a single flaw in it. So top marks.

Nicholas Lezard, The Independent, 6th July 2008

John Finnemore's new situation comedy has the benefit of a superb cast. Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole and Benedict Cumberbatch give their all to this story of a small charter airline whose single plane is flown by one blasé old know-it-all (Allam) and one fiercely competitive young thruster (Cumberbatch). The whole shebang is owned by a fearsome divorcée (Cole) who has come by the plane in a divorce settlement. Her other inheritance is a dim son (played by the author) whose meek optimism is amply reflected in the laughter from the studio audience.

Gillian Reynolds, The Telegraph, 2nd July 2008

The fear and joys of flying have been a comedy staple for decades, and every joke it is possible to make has probably been made. The challenge is to tell the old jokes in a new way. So step forward, experienced wordsmith (Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Sound) John Finnemore, with this new six-part sitcom about a one-plane outfit run by an autocratic divorcée (Stephanie Cole, doing her usual posh bully bit).

Her aircraft has two pilots, one a jaded cynic with a dodgy past who can, though, actually fly (played to worldweary perfection by Roger Allam) and one who seemed to have got his wings through a correspondence college (Benedict Cumberbatch, showing he can do situation comedy as well as he does everything else in the thesp game).

Chuck in Finnemore himself as Cole's keen but dim son-of-all work, plus an unusually high level of well-researched technical information about flying, and you have a half-hour that flies by (fnaarg fnaarg).

Chris Campling, The Times, 2nd July 2008