Beautiful People

Simon's back from New York with a broken heart and off reminiscing about his childhood again. Back in the 90s, 14-year-old Simon is researching his family tree when he discovers his parents have a shocking secret. He self-harms with his mum's lip-liner to cope. It's a strange comedy, sustained entirely by bad jokes. The performances are brilliant, particularly Olivia Colman, who steals every one of her scenes, but the script is shocking. Still, Starting Together by Su Pollard doesn't see the light of day that often, so that's one good thing to come out of it.

If The Office made Slough look dismal then Beautiful People makes suburban Reading look similarly gloomy, especially from the viewpoint of an effeminate 13-year-old schoolboy desperate for the glitz, glamour and excitement of London. Written by Jonathan Harvey (Gimme Gimme Gimme) and based upon the childhood memoirs of Simon Doonan, creative director of Barney's department store in New York, the camp comedy drama is back for a second six-part series. Using flashbacks, narration and fantasy sequences, each episode centres upon how Simon (played by Luke Ward-Wilkinson and, in his older years, Samuel Barnett) came to own some of his most treasured possessions. In this first episode Simon recalls a school genealogy project that led him to find out that his parents never actually married.

Winner of the Best Comedy Award at the Banff TV Festival (no, me neither) this sitcom is an acquired taste - a cocktail of Advocaat and helium. Simon Doonan's memoirs of Reading ("Reading: You're Welcome To It," as the road sign puts it), the start of series two finds its caricature of family life still slapping on comedy with a spangly trowel.

Surprisingly, it's written by Jonathan Harvey who penned Gimme Gimme Gimme and creates some of the funniest scripts on Corrie. In one interview he said he originally thought that writing for the soap would be beneath him. If he thought Corrie was beneath him, he must have needed a diving bell to sink to the comedic depths of Beautiful People.

The cast - including Olivia Colman and Aidan McArdle as Simon's parents - gamely give it their best shot tonight as Simon discovers that, gasp, they're not married.