How Not To Live Your Life

Men don't emerge very well from How Not to Live Your Life either, though the specimens on show in BBC3's sitcom are too timid and childish to represent a threat to anybody but themselves. I have a faint memory that I gave a charitable review to Dan Clark's series on an earlier occasion, for which I can offer my apologies, because whatever virtues I detected in it then have entirely evaporated. The gimmick is an occasional break for an animated Letterman list gag - "Five Things You Shouldn't Do in the Theatre", for example - with the narrative action pausing as Clark acts out the alternatives. There are moments when the lips twitch fitfully during these sequences, but they're restored to default mode (frozen into a kind of appalled wince) by the startling charmlessness of the central character in all the other bits. Oddly, my technology continues to try and tell me things. The DVD player stalled at one point and flashed up a message: "There was an error reading from disc. It might be scratched or dirty". Dirty, I think, given that our hero had just extricated himself from an awkward relationship by pretending to be a gerontophile: "You don't need someone to wipe your bum after you've been to the toilet," he explained apologetically, "...and that's the kind of thing that gets me going." "Are you sure you want to quit?" the DVD software asked me as I finished watching and closed it down. There are days when it crosses my mind, I thought.

An immature 20-something blunders through life, narrating his every impolite thought - remind you of anything? This is a Peep Show rip-off with a gimmick: our protagonist likes to stop the action and fantasise about different ways of misbehaving - as if he isn't rude enough in real life. Yes, it's puerile; but there's something fun about watching the irredeemable Don misinterpret the world around him. He began this series heartbroken after his beloved (understandably) fled the country and in this episode seduces an older woman...with a little too much success.