Splash! and Tumble are too far fetched for W1A

John Morton: "If I had been writing that in a draft for a script before it happened, I would have thought, 'No, who are you kidding?'"

Ricky Gervais changed the way we look at our working lives with his lampooning of crap desk jobs on crap British light industrial estates in The Office. The cod-documentary W1A, John Morton's follow-up to his Olympic satire Twenty Twelve, takes an updated potshot at management and the workplace, this time in the consultant-speak era of 2014, and against the backdrop of the BBC's New Broadcasting House.

This is an environment where high-vis-wearing executives are forever carrying Brompton folding bikes round open-plan offices, chairing pointless meetings of the Way Ahead Task Force or the Senior Damage Limitation Group in glass "informal spaces" before attending one of the regular "digital handshake" sessions for staff. Even as parliament debates whether to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, the self-lampooning W1A demonstrates that the BBC has a very British ability to laugh at itself.

W1A walks fine line but it is lovingly done

From John Morton, the writer who brought us Twenty Twelve, comes W1A, in which Hugh Bonneville reprises his role as Ian Fletcher, now the new Head of Values at the BBC, tasked with thinking big thoughts and finding a 'Way Ahead' for the corporation.

W1A review

Senior managers at the BBC gave John Morton carte blanche to mock the organisation. Perhaps they believed this would be a parody of management culture in general. But from the first seconds, W1A signalled its merciless intentions.

Radio Times review

This new sitcom was born out of the success - but necessarily short shelf life - of the delicious Twenty Twelve. The idea of the BBC making a satire on the workings of the BBC is painfully circular but also, as it turns out, painfully funny.

Even so, the show walks a tightrope. In one scene here, Ian "So that's all good" Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), now the BBC's newly appointed Head of Values, is hunting for a meeting room at Broadcasting House. He opens a door to find Alan Yentob and Salman Rushdie arm-wrestling while listening to opera. It's both a hilariously daring in-joke and the kind of thing you hope they keep in small doses. Too many knowing winks at the audience could get precious.

There are other celebrity cameos, but the joy of the show, as with Twenty Twelve, is the bland corporate-speak, the ability of conversations to progress with nothing being said in a flurry of Yes-no-absolutelys and Right-goods. This is writer John Morton's special gift (he's been doing it since People like Us on Radio 4) and he does it better than anyone.

BBC goes meta with 'W1A'

John Morton, writer of W1A and Twenty Twelve, said he was "really surprised" by the free hand he had been given. "It does seem that we've not had any interference at all," he said. "I wouldn't have been surprised had people been more wary."

This was the year of Olympic memories - Danny Boyle's opening ceremony, the Queen ad-libbing with James Bond, a cascade of British Gold - but John Morton's comedy supplied the biggest laughs week after week. It was, in the words of Ian Fletcher, "all good".

Could there be a follow-up to Twenty Twelve?

Head of Deliverance Hugh Bonneville discusses the future of John Morton's hugely popular mockumentary.

'Can we afford a last minute disaster or not?' wonders Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher. The deliverance team manages to stumble over the finishing line tonight but, as ever, they're more Derek Redmond than Usain Bolt. Tonight's minor crises include a putative bell-ringing ceremony involving Aled Jones and a conceptual artist, and concerns about the fireworks at the opening ceremony triggering the ground-to-air missiles. Still, at least they haven't had to call in the army to provide security. The end hedges its bets slightly - surely this late in the day, writer John Morton must have been tempted to offer us some closure - but overall, this has been an exponentially multiplying delight and a triumph of English self-deprecation. Now to find out if the truth can be stranger than fiction...

Ian Fletcher writes about the day of deliverance

Few people have made a greater mark on the public imagination in the build-up to the Games than Ian Fletcher, the can-do, two-wheeled driving force of Twenty Twelve.