Kris Marshall banned for refusing breath test

Actor Kris Marshall was banned from driving for six months yesterday after he admitted dodging a breath test.

My Family star Kris Marshall on drink driving charge

My Family actor and BT advert star Kris Marshall will answer a motoring charge in Somerset.

Kris Marshall charged after refusing breath test

My Family actor and BT advert star Kris Marshall has been charged with motoring offences after failing to supply a breath test.

My Family, your family, our family

After 114 episodes, My Family takes its final bow tonight. The popular BBC One sitcom stars Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker as parents Ben and Susan Harper alongside a brood of children, cousins and uninvited house guests, played over the years by Kris Marshall, Daniela Denby-Ashe, Gabriel Thompson, Siobhan Hayes, Keiron Self, Rhodri Meilir and Tayler Marshall.

DOA (BBC3) is a new comedy about ambulance drivers, starring Kris Marshall, the guy from that series of BT ads. One imagines he's been looking for an exit strategy for some time now. Could this be it?

It got off to a cracking start, with Marshall playing Tom, a junior doctor who's been downgraded to paramedic while awaiting a decision about a malpractice case ("You're the guy who took out the wrong lung," said a colleague). He's partnered with driver Julie, who sells sex toys from the back of the ambulance, and their first patient was a man who'd had his fingers bitten off by a pet alligator. It's quite funny, deeply gory and more than a little in love with its own sense of transgression. Each new character was more irredeemable than the last, and the whole thing was quickly swamped in blood-drenched, vomit-flecked excess. I've got no problem with DOA being in questionable taste - I am myself a man of questionable tastes - but I have no idea where they go from here. They used up a season's worth of fake barf in one go.

BT ad man and My Family graduate Kris Marshall rests those elastic chops in order to play it straight as a doctor who is forced to take a turn as a paramedic after an investigation into a botched operation implicates him in a patient's death. So begins a dark comedy pilot that manages to juggle on-screen projectile vomiting with washed-out, Getting On-style camerawork and wry gags about alligators as pets. At points it's a little too Psychoville, but with Kevin Eldon and Karen Taylor on board, it really should be turned into a full series.

Kris Marshall's boozy rant at Ricky Gervais

My Family star Kris Marshall has been caught on video in an astonishing drunken rant at comic Ricky Gervais.

Clive Coleman's generation gap sitcom stars Kris Marshall (you know, the stepdad from the BT ads) as Harry, a forty-something who's somewhat alarmed by his father's spending habits, his father Brian (Kenneth Cranham), being rich and unencumbered by school fees, mortgage, etc. And there's prosperous brother Richard (Chris Pavlo) to reckon with too, the one who buys Dad expensive golf clubs. The brothers take Dad out while the womenfolk set up his surprise 65th birthday party. Back in the kitchen, control freak wars erupt.

If you were to come across Clive Coleman's six-part drama cold, you might think it was a comedy - particularly as that is how it's billed. But there are dark days ahead for amiable nonentity Harry who is shrivelling in the shadow cast by his more successful elder brother Richard. When not jetting out of and back into Bahrain on the company jet, Richard is lavishing rare and precious gifts on their father, Brian. All Harry can offer is his house as a setting for Brian's 65th birthday party - and even then Brian's wife Liz shoulders Harry's wife Jo out of the way when it comes to setting up things properly. But Harry has a chance to reclaim a spark of dignity - the speech he has been preparing for a year, one that will make him the golden boy, if only for an hour. A top cast - Kris Marshall and Raquel Cassidy to the fore - does justice to a fine script.

Clive Coleman's six-parter Spending My Inheritance was clearly intended to address the impolite notion that 30 and 40-somethings are casting covetous eyes at their parents' final salary pensions and the sky is the limit value of their mortgage-free properties.

Somewhere between Coleman typing 'The end' and transmission of the first episode, the credit crunch storm blew in. So the idea of a senior member of the golf-playing classes and his wife releasing equity on their house for a grey pound-splurging spree while their debt and responsibility-ridden middle-aged son looks on in horror, seems merely fanciful.

Now, perhaps I'm jumping the gun here. So far, Brian and Liz (Kenneth Cranham and Judy Parfitt) haven't actually got round to the equity release, but they are showing a superhuman dedication to the good life and their son Harry (Kris Marshall) is tearing his hair out as he attempts to live up to the expectations created by their other, careerist, son. So maybe later on we'll find out if a bit of crunchy credit has been written into this scream of inter-generational angst.

In the meantime, Marshall jumps around jabbering so hyperactively as Harry that I can hardly blame his parents if they do go on a spend, spend, spend mission destined to leave him nothing. I can be laughed into submission over most things, but another five weeks of far from hilarious Harry might have me contemplating hara-kiri.