Rob Buckley

Real-life best friends Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells pen a tale about best friends Em and Doll, with Doll joining actress Em in LA to work for her when her relationship falls apart. It's all very naturalistic and obviously feels like a real friendship. Funny? Not in the slightest and there's nothing you can glean from it that you won't have from a dozen other shows like it (e.g. Entourage, Episodes, Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Blandings is based in part on the rather funny PG Wodehouse novels and stars Jennifer Saunders, Mark Williams and Timothy Spall. Now, the books themselves aren't exactly hard-hitting bits of realism, but there's nothing worse than a comedy in which everyone involved (with the exception of the above-mentioned) is grinning and acting like idiots because they know the whole thing is silly. So I gave up after 10 minutes. Absolutely horrendous and twee.

Three down-at-heel, down-on-their-luck blokes decide to set up an assisted suicide business. In common with a lot of shows on BBC3, it's not very good at all, despite having been written by US-writer Bob Kushell (The Simpsons, Third Rock...) and featuring Blake Harrison of The Inbetweeners, but that's largely down to both the filming and the cast, which both work against any actual comedy occurring. It also falls victim to the other "US writer discovers British creative freedoms" syndrome - a substitution of things that would be banned on US TV for things that might be funny.

In praise of Jonathan Ross's past work

So Jonathan Ross's BBC chat show has finished. It has ceased to be. He's off now to ITV. It's easy to knock him for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, although he frequently knew what he was talking about...

Red Dwarf - The US pilots

Back in the 90s, there were two attempts to remake Red Dwarf, with two completely different casts. The first was a full-length pilot, with only Robert Llewellyn returning to play Kryten. When that didn't go down well, a shorter "greatest hits" alternative with another cast got made. And that didn't go down much better either, so it never went to series.

As this week's QI repeat proved, David Mitchell is obviously one of the smartest and funniest men on TV at the moment, and is probably the inheritor of Stephen Fry's mantel. So what the hell was he doing on this? Charlie Brooker was great, of course, as was Mitchell, but Jimmy Carr filled time by making jokes about Gordon Brown's eye and Lauren Laverne was just using up valuable oxygen the whole time. Oh dear.

Review: That Mitchell and Webb Look 3x1

Despite David Mitchell's understandable dislike of football, I'm going to describe the first episode of the new series as 'a game of two halves'.

I kind of liked The InBetweeners. Okay, it was on E4, the watching of which, as Stewart Lee pointed out this week in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, is normally like connecting a giant sewage pipe to your house. But it was surprisingly funny for a show aimed at "young adults" and was a refreshing antidote to Skins' über-coolness, principally thanks to its more realistic premise: four blokes who aren't quite nerds but who aren't popular, trying to be cool but failing.

Blog Review

Ah, Charlie Brooker. Anyone with any sense and love of TV reads his Guardian Screen Burn column every Saturday. It's usually the funniest thing you'll read that week. However, his Screen Wipe review show, which pretty much translates Screen Burn into pictures, hasn't been so compelling.

Off The Telly Series 1 Review

Linehan avoids the trap of simply mocking the two characters for being geeks, and instead makes them both sympathetic. Given that most viewers in real life are more likely to be on the side of the beautiful people rather than the IT department, it's a reasonably brave decision, particularly when the show mocks the lack of IT savvy among those viewers.