An Interview with Green Wing's Pippa Haywood

It takes a hell of an actress to play Green Wing's despicable yet lovable slut Joanna Clore - here the ultra-cool Pippa who pulls it off, talks very, very openly to handbag about acting, wrinkles and the rest of the cast.

The first series of Green Wing (Friday, C4) was one of the most freshly funny and crisply innovative comedies for years. The humour was all based in the character, not the situation. The story lines were negligible; there were no catch phrases; it was surreal in a way we hadn't seen since Monty Python; and the cast were actors being funny from inside a characterisation, not stand-up comics bolting a cartoon persona onto the back of gags. There had been a worrying gap between the first and second series, but finally we got the preview ads, and a run of the previous series as a fanfare and a reminder. Then the new one began with a dream sequence. Oh my God, I could hardly believe my eyes. Was I asleep? No, it really was a dream sequence.

Now, every 11-year-old knows dream sequences are the lowest form of plotting solution, lower than unexplained superpowers such as the ability to stop time or become invisible; even lower than a magic get-better potion. Within two minutes, Green Wing had destroyed itself, lost its assured grip on the cliff of comedy and tumbled into the abyss of embarrassing overacting, formless gurning and pointless repetition. What had once looked Dada-ishly brilliant now looked like stoned improv from a show-off's drama school. The lack of plot and coherent narrative that previously had been a blessed freedom was revealed to be a formless free-for-all, brilliant performances as silly mannerisms. Nothing I've seen this year has disappointed me as sharply as the second series of Green Wing. As Tom Paine so poignantly pointed out, only a step separates the sublime from the ridiculous.

Oliver Chris: My Life In Travel

'Sea lions are like underwater Labradors - they're just so friendly'

The eyebrows have it

After the slapstick of Green Wing, how will Tamsin Greig play the Bard, asks Stephen Armstrong.

Winging It

He was standing around, minding his own business, Julian Rhind-Tutt tells Zoe Williams, when he got 'very, very lucky' and became an actor. Couldn't talent, she asks, have had something to do with it?

Winging It: an in-depth look at Green Wing

The overlooked British hospital comedy Green Wing has shredded the traditional-sitcom blueprint and eschewed the medical-show clichés.

The search for comedy goes on. The latest serious attempt to make you laugh is Green Wing (Friday, C4). Medical comedies are a genre all of their own. Medicine has come a long way since Doctor in the House, James Robertson Justice and all that "Ooh er, matron" bedpan stuff - but, sadly, medical humour hasn't, like the military tattoo. Hospital jokes are still rooted in the past.

If I had reviewed the first episode of Green Wing last week, I would have given it a much rougher proctological examination than I am prepared to now. Having seen the second, its setup, dynamics and dialogue are quite clearly attempts to join in the subgenre of comedies that want to be the next Office (the last one was The Smoking Room). In the first episode, I found the style imitation annoying, but by the second, the cast had taken over. Green Wing has a better ensemble of actors than any comedy you have seen for ages, and they have created some amusing, repulsive and compulsively weird characters. What the drama lacks is a coherent overall sense of purpose and direction. So much of it is too much like plaiting with double acts; it needs an infrastructure, an injection of M*A*S*H.