'Trollied' debuts with 1.1m on Sky1

Sky1's new comedy Trollied launched with more than 1m viewers on Thursday night, while Torchwood continued to shed viewers, according to the latest audience data.

Review: Trollied (Sky1)

Having already cornered the majority of the British marketplace when it comes to sports, movies and premium US drama, Sky are now making headway into domestic comedy and drama. Eight-part supermarket comedy Trollied is their latest venture (with Mount Pleasant, Hit & Miss, This Is Jinsy, and Spy still to come), ironically starring a few actors from Asda/Tesco commercials, set in the fictional north-west supermarket Valco. The store's tagline is "serve you right", but thankfully I wasn't left thinking the same thing to myself after watching it.

There are some things you know really shouldn't make you laugh but somehow completely crack you up. So it was with an exchange on Trollied in which interim supermarket boss Julie (Jane Horrocks) informed the deli counter that she was, ahem, interimming. I'll run that past you one more time: she said she was 'interimming'. Suffice to say the butcher boys - Mark Addy and Nick Blood, having a ball - chewed that one up and spat it out for all it was worth.

Away from the unreconstituted filth, not all of Trollied hit the same spot. Horrocks was aiming for pathos as the socially inept Jane but it was a little too easy to see why everyone wanted to see the back of her. Jason Watkins, beloved of Psychoville and Being Human fans, seemed oddly muted as her boss.

It's the minor characters that make Trollied worth tailgating, with a psychotic shoplifter, a man with a habit of shooting a can of aerosol cream into his mouth by way of a perk, the pick of the bunch. More of him, and more airtime for the fledgling romance twixt butcher boy Kieran and his till-trapped admirer, and Trollied could yet beat the bargain bin.

It's The Office meets ASDA and it stars Jane Horrocks - as acting deputy manager Julie at Valco, a northern supermarket.

The art department has done a cracking job too - it looks absolutely bang-on, even though thanks to the magic of television, it was all filmed in a Bristol studio - in other words nowhere near "the north".

Plus it's full of left-over folk from Corrie - like Rita May who plays the very lovely and slightly dotty Margaret, who's got her very first job thanks to Valco's policy of employing older members of staff.

Mark Addy's in it too, behind the butcher counter and there's a nice Tim 'n' Dawn style romance between check-out girl Katie (Chanel Cresswell) and butcher's assistant Kieran (Nick Blood).

The second episode tonight is better than the first one, as the real assistant manager (another ex-Corrie star Rachel Leskovac) comes back to work to show everyone her new baby daughter.

She's popular, relaxed and genuinely well liked - all the things that bossy, ambitious Julie isn't, but would kill to be.

Actually, Jane Horrocks is the least good thing about this series - she's just not awful or deluded enough to be another David Brent, plus she's doing it all in a northern version of the posh voice she used in the Tesco ads.

For my money, the best characters are Sue and Linda (Lorraine Cheshire and Faye McKeever) - a buy-one-get-one-free double act who have some splendidly dirty jokes.

Jane Horrocks trades Tesco for Valco in Trollied

Trollied. Check it out tonight on Sky1 HD. Definitely one to keep an eye on and then think about it the next time you're in a supermarket no matter where you are and see just how close life comes to imitating art and vice versa.

The Office may now be a decade old, but its influence can certainly be felt on this workplace comedy that also features a hapless authority figure, apathetic employees and even some Tim-and-Dawn-style unrequited romance. The setting is Valco, a budget supermarket in the North West, where Jane Horrocks plays Jill, the interim deputy manager, who's the kind to open a conversation with "no offence" and then immediately go on to wound the feelings of her subordinates. You know the type - bristling with ambition, but unable to keep from cramming her foot into her mouth at every opportunity. As for the humour, well, it feels a little broad at this point, particularly the scenes involving Jill's attempts to ingratiate herself with her boss Gavin (Jason Watkins), which predictably end with her buried in social shame. But there's definite potential in the slippage between the store's happy-to-help façade and the general disillusionment of its staff, with Nick Blood and The Full Monty's Mark Addy proving to be particularly effective in this opening double bill as butchering duo Kieran and Andy.

Trollied review: Super(market)

It's a compliment to Trollied to say that watching the first episode makes you wonder why no one has bothered to write a sitcom based in a supermarket before.

You have to give sitcoms a chance, a huge chance. You have to take the amount of time you'd give, say, a prospective brother-in-law, and multiply that by the number of characters there are. Because eventually, once you've got to know them, you're going to find them a lot funnier.

This is the theory. I've heard it expounded a lot - although, admittedly, mainly by one person who works in TV. But trying not to fall into the trap of hating everything immediately, there are bits of Trollied (Sky 1) that are a little lazy; the plotting is a bit half-cocked. Jane Horrocks's interim manager is about to have a party, and she gets blown out by everybody, including her sister; she immediately swallows her pride and asks the guys on the butchery counter, and they immediately say no.

Computer programmers talk about the "five whys": so that if you ask "why" once, then you might partly mend a bug in a program, but if you ask it five times, then you'll probably design something quite good. It's a bit random, but try deploying it in a script meeting. Why do all her guests blow her out? Why is she so desperate to have the party in the first place? Why would she invite two people who manifestly dislike her, when she has a whole supermarket full of underlings? Why, when she's apparently quite a flexible person who finds it easy to put her vanity aside, doesn't she have more friends? Why did they cast Horrocks in the first place? Is it just because every time they thought "supermarket", they got a visual picture of her wrinkling her pretty nose and arguing with Prunella Scales?

I strongly suspect that the answer to all these questions is "We don't know" and that, furthermore, if this was a computer program, it would work for about five minutes, and then it would wipe your hard drive.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at its puerile humour, sometimes out loud. Two check-out ladies, discussing Woody Allen, agree that running off with your stepdaughter is creepy, then one of them throws in: "I gave my cousin a handjob once, in a caravan." OK, it's not Oscar Wilde. And nor is the extremely extended wordplay between two homophonous phrases, one of which is qwite wude. (Horrocks is the interim deputy manager, and says "while I'm interimming . . .", whereupon the butchers go "loads of people are into rimming" and she says, "you need to face up to the fact that I'm the only one who's interimming", and they fall about. And so did I. I'm not proud of it). Nevertheless, I'm afraid it didn't really grow on me for its second episode, and its obvious antecedents - it's trying so hard to be The Office that it has Ricky Gervais's face tattooed, metaphorically, across its own - grated a bit. The Dawn-and-Tim-alike romance is particularly plain, and I don't think it really benefits from the unavoidable comparison. Though you never know, watch it a bit longer, you may come to love them.

Trollied, Sky1, review

Jane Horrocks did those Tesco ads for so long, it came as a bit of a surprise to see her in an actual programme last night. But plus ça change: despite Horrocks having an acting CV that stretches from Life Is Sweet to Little Voice via Absolutely Fabulous, Trollied was set in a supermarket not a million miles from your average Tesco.

Trollied may come from the school of Shameless - via director Paul Walker and lead writer Julie Rutterford - but it's a very different can of beans. Set in a budget supermarket in the North, it offers gentle humour and finds amusement in the familiar and the peculiar. Broad-based and character-led, the opening double bill offers promise of good things to come, with a cast that includes the fabulous Jane Horrocks as a prissy and insecure interim deputy manager, Mark Addy as the supermarket butcher, and Jason Watkins as exasperated manager Gavin.