Campus Review

A welcome return for Channel 4's comedy pilot season, kicking off with a university-set retread of Green Wing. It's impossible not to think of that hospital comedy when watching Campus, as the same creative team are behind both, and Campus made no attempt to evolve beyond its progenitor. If you loved Green Wing, chance are you'll have your fingers crossed Campus gets a full series. If you hated Green Wing, you'll hate this...

The comedy taster series has yielded successes such as The Kevin Bishop Show and Free Agents, and Campus already looks a racing certainty for development. Created by Victoria "Green Wing" Pile, this unveils another cast of freaks who have somehow come to be employed in an ostensibly respectable institution, in this case, a redbrick university. Glory-mad vice-chancellor Jonty DeWolfe (Dead Set's Andy Nyman) presides over priapic English professors and incompetent administrators, while the influences of The Office and A Very Peculiar Practice loom large, but not distractingly so. Could prove unpleasantly great.

This strand dedicated to showcasing up-and-coming comedy talent returns for a second series. In Campus, the first of seven one-offs, a selection of vaguely familiar faces (among them Andy Nyman from E4's zomcom Dead Set) assume the roles of staff working at the fictitious Kirke University. Written by some of the team behind Green Wing, Campus is dark but only mildly funny.

This is the series where Channel 4 kicks some fledgling sitcoms out of the nest to see which ones will fly. The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents all came out of 2007's try-outs and I'd put money on Campus getting the green light - especially as it's set in Kirke University (motto: "With Wings").

It feels like Green Wing Goes To College, because it was made by that show's creator Victoria Pile and her team. Like Green Wing it has that same air of institutionalised in-breeding about it and is backed by another distinctively woozy soundtrack by Trellis.

There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good. It's as if the challenge was how weird can we make these people and still have them breathe oxygen?

Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy and Caroline.

Comedy Showcase is one of Channel 4's most valuable strands. By broadcasting standalone comedies, it's about as close as television gets nowadays to giving established and up-and-coming comic writers the right to fail. Inevitably this freedom results in much riskier and more innovative work, and the first round of programmes in 2007 led to series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents. The curtain-raiser in this new series was written by Victoria Pile of Green Wing fame. It is, in fact, exactly like the surreal hospital- set comedy series, but transferred to a university setting, with the same heady mix of bizarre characters, savage banter, surreal fantasy and bracing filth. Anyone who enjoyed Green Wing should feel immediately at home.

This is Channel 4's try-out zone for comedy pilots, a playpen for ideas that might, with the right encouragement, turn into fully-fledged IT Crowds or Green Wings. We start with Campus, and if there were a quicker way to describe it than "Green Wing in a university", I'd use it. Luckily, this isn't some low-grade knock off: it comes from the Green Wing team themselves, so expectations may be unreasonably high for Campus and it may not quite live up to them. Nothing could. But that doesn't mean it isn't very funny and enjoyably strange. The characters feel fully formed and ready for a series: vice-chancellor Jonty de Wolfe is the most extreme, a power-crazed bully with a megaphone somewhere between David Brent and 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy, but with worse hair. In his sights is lazy English lecturer Matt Beer, who in turn is pursuing bespectacled maths star Imogen Moffat. There are brilliant moments and lovely sight gags: the scene with a clapping mechanical monkey just before the first ad break is a cracker.

Channel 4 embarks on another exercise in looking for a new comedy series by commissioning a series of pilots, starting with Campus, from the team that brought you Green Wing. There will be some comparison to the much-missed Green Wing, and that would be fair. But there is a lot here that gives cause to think this is a shoe-in for series treatment.

"Just because Stephen Hawking, a famously disabled spastic, created his theories of black holes and the boundary conditions of the universe, whilst sitting in his wheelchair, it doesn't mean that you will be able to," says Jonty de Wolfe (comedy name!), vice chancellor of Kirke University, to a young man in a wheelchair.

Ah, I see, Campus (Channel 4) is taking that path: the offensive one. There's nothing wrong with that; offence can be good, if done artfully. There's plenty of it here - Jonty's bigotry and English literature lecturer Matt Beer's (comedy name, like beer mat, but the other way round!) sex pesting. There is talk of rape by pigs, and odd-shaped anal cavities that lead to odd-shaped stools. I'm just not convinced it is being done very artfully. It seems more like offence for the sake of offence. Compare it with the beautifully crafted filth of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It. If he is the Michelangelo of offence, this is Rolf Harris.

These Comedy Showcases are a great idea - pilots, which do or don't get turned into a series. Plus One came from it, and Free Agents. I'd put this one in the "don't" pile. It's also very obviously trying to be Green Wing, but relocated to a university. It looks like Green Wing, sounds like it, and adopts some of its tricks and surrealisms. But - and it's a big but, especially in a comedy - I'm not laughing very much. And I was, a lot, in Green Wing. That was original, and surprising, more subtle I think ... Hell, I don't know why something is funny, and something else isn't. They just are, OK?

Comedy Showcase is a platform for C4 to test out new comedy pilots and it begins with the very promising Campus, which comes from the people behind Green Wing and Smack The Pony. It's led by a character called Jonty de Wolfe, a staggeringly un-PC David Brent-alike who takes potshots at 'foreigns and disableds' and is in charge of a low-rent university. The script is from the top-drawer, the cast of university staff fed up and funny... fingers crossed that this one gets green-lit.

How many misfits does it take to run a university? Should this question ever pop up in the miscellaneous round of a pub quiz somewhere in Weirdchester, you'll be grateful for having watched Campus, the new show conceived by Victoria Pile and the team behind Green Wing and Smack The Pony.

At the show's heart is chief misfit Jonty de Wolfe. Played by Andy Nyman, the megaphone-wielding, peppermint tea-sipping Vice Chancellor turns kooky, quirky and crass up to eleven. Joseph Millson (Casino Royal) is lecherous literature lecturer Matthew Beer, and Dolly Wells (Star Stories) takes a marvellous turn as a behind-the-scenes worker nicknamed "the big shit" as a schoolgirl. "Because I was a big shit," she explains, "and also because I do big shits."

Campus is set in the fictitious Kirke University and looks every bit the "ensemble comedy". The camerawork is jittery without irritating, and the writers have conjured a veritable symphony of comic characters. On the evening the show was introduced with no little wryness as "not the Green Wing set in a university." Derivative? Perhaps. But I'd be happy to watch the Green Wing set anywhere, thanks very much.