Twenty Twelve: Missing the heart of a good sitcom

Humour is a matter of taste. A joke that has one audience howling with laughter can leave another simply howling. The same applies to television comedy. Which is why it's not surprising that the reviews for BBC Four's new spoof doc, Twenty Twelve, were mixed. I was in the equivocal camp.

TV review: Twenty Twelve

Here's a tough one. What makes a comedy show funny? An amusing premise, yes, a talented cast, obviously, farcical situations, humorous dialogue, recognisable characters, a production team with a good track record, etc. Twenty Twelve, BBC 4's new Olympic-themed sitcom, has all of that. I still can't work out why I didn't laugh.

There will come a time soon, after the cost is tallied and the results examined, when the 2012 London Olympics will be no laughing matter. Until then, it's fair game. Writer/director John Morton previously helmed the great People Like Us, and here the tone is similar and the standard just as high.

Set in the Olympics Deliveries Committee, complete with dreadful logo, we meet the excellent cast - Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Coleman, Jessica Hynes, Vincent Franklin - as they prepare to relaunch their website.

A terrific start, mostly stolen by Hynes's spot-on PR agent.

John Morton, writer/director behind People like Us and Broken News, has a potential hit on his hands with this timely, engaging docuspoof. Narrated by David Tennant, it charts the bungling activities of the Olympic Deliverance Commission, a small team led by Ian Fletcher (redoubtable Hugh Bonneville), whose task is to smooth the run-up to 2012. On this week's agenda: nominating national heroes to be torchbearers (so that's, erm, Alan Sugar, Bruce Forsyth, Gok Wan...) and repurposing the tae kwon do stadium after the Games.

Every character in the ODC team shows promise, with Jessica Hynes amusingly maddening as PR bod Siobhan Sharp, whose assertiveness is exceeded only by her ineptitude ("Matthew Pinsent? I don't even know who that is"). She ends up babbling at the Tate Modern launch of her pet project - a hideous, green clock that mystifyingly counts backwards from 2012 to today. Seb and Boris, of course, get frequent name-checks and at least one of them will show up later in the series. It's a runner.

New BBC sitcom mocks Britain's Olympic preparations

Twenty Twelve, a new BBC Four 'mockumentary', starts tonight. Here's a preview of the opening episode.

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The chairman of the London Organising Committee sends himself up in new BBC mockumentary Twenty Twelve.

Deliciously skewering everyone from marketing creatives and PRs to web designers, John Morton's mockumentary (narrated by David Tennant) about the "Olympic Deliverance" team preparing for 2012 appears both painful and probable. It is the characterisation that is so sharp and knowing, while the execution is all the better for its subtlety.

Heading the team is the exasperated Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), who frequently despairs in his hapless staff. Aside from the bluff Nick Jowett (Vincent Franklin), who is prone to uttering, "I don't care who you are. I'm sorry, I'm from Yorkshire and I'm not having it", Fletcher is painted as the only one with a glimmer of competence. An early crisis is that the 2012 countdown clock has been designed by a curmudgeonly British artist, who refuses to explain how it works, or admit that it is flawed. It was commissioned by Head of Brand, Siobhan Sharpe (Jessica Hynes), a firm believer in "adspeak", who is often framed as clueless. Her suggestions for national heroes to be Olympic torch-bearers include Bruce Forsyth and Gok Wan, and she confuses the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy with the Welsh singer Duffy. Meanwhile, her colleague Kay Hope (Amelia Bullmore), Head of Sustainability, wonders if the taekwondo hall might make a good donkey sanctuary once the Games themselves are finished.

TV review: Twenty Twelve

Twenty Twelve has its moments, but Boris Johnson's ping pong speech will always be funnier

God, it's miserable, isn't it? Seriously. The world is a horrible, depressing mess. Even comedies make you want to cry. (Have you seen that last episode of Partridge?). So Twenty Twelve runs into a tvBite office wanting a laugh so badly, if we saw a pigeon at Wimbledon, we'd actually join in the hilarity. It's a good pedigree, written by John Morton, the maker of People Like Us, a brilliant show struck down by Glitteritis.

It suffers a tad by comparison to other office-based, hyper-real sitcoms, in that post-Office and Thick Of It, we've now seen workplace incompetence milked for just about every laugh. But that's about the only problem. The writing is sharp, the hook of the Olympics is a decent one and even if it wasn't any good, Jessica Hynes would drag it across the finish line anyway, turning in a show-stealing performance as a ditzy PR.