The W1A way

It's water-cooler TV: a darkly comic examination of office life as it is lived in the capital, revealing an environment of corporate fear, open-plan loathing and Kafka-esque manoeuvring that is both tragic and banal.

Ricky Gervais changed the way we look at our working lives with his lampooning of crap desk jobs on crap British light industrial estates in The Office. The cod-documentary W1A, John Morton's follow-up to his Olympic satire Twenty Twelve, takes an updated potshot at management and the workplace, this time in the consultant-speak era of 2014, and against the backdrop of the BBC's New Broadcasting House.

This is an environment where high-vis-wearing executives are forever carrying Brompton folding bikes round open-plan offices, chairing pointless meetings of the Way Ahead Task Force or the Senior Damage Limitation Group in glass "informal spaces" before attending one of the regular "digital handshake" sessions for staff. Even as parliament debates whether to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, the self-lampooning W1A demonstrates that the BBC has a very British ability to laugh at itself.

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W1A - TV review

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W1A, BBC Two, review

On the evidence of this opener, W1A doesn't have the charm of its predecessor Twenty Twelve.

Sometimes you watch a comedy and think "this is clever, isn't it?" and then you realise that, actually, you're not laughing all that much. So it was with W1A (BBC Two), a sort-of sequel to Olympics spoof Twenty Twelve that switches the satirical spotlight on to the BBC itself.

Look at us, we're the BBC and we can laugh at ourselves, is the subtext as David Tennant's arch voice-over guides us around BBC HQ in a maze of corporate speak, introducing us to a grazing herd of corporate types with a remit to think Big Thoughts and babble nonsense about 'appointment to view' television.

In the middle of it all, doing his dazed labrador thing, returns Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher, this time as the BBC's new Head of Values, which seems to be exactly the same job as Director of Strategic Governance, played with obsequious brilliance by Jason Watkins, a comic actor of impressive versatility.

So far, so potentially side-splitting. Somehow, though, the in-jokery felt a touch too pleased with itself. A scene where Fletcher stumbled in on Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob in the middle of an arm-wrestle bout was telling, a bit like that first day in a new job when someone says: "You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps" and you cringe, thinking: "Get me out of here now."

Let's not sound too harsh: W1A is ingeniously scripted, painting a neat picture of a culture where covering your back is number one in any ambitious individual's skill set. And things really picked up when, belatedly, Jessica Hynes returned as nightmare PR Siobhan Sharpe, a character so deliriously loathsome it really is funny. Whereas seeing a BBC run by bumbling idiots is merely believably bothersome: after all, we're paying for them.

W1A walks fine line but it is lovingly done

From John Morton, the writer who brought us Twenty Twelve, comes W1A, in which Hugh Bonneville reprises his role as Ian Fletcher, now the new Head of Values at the BBC, tasked with thinking big thoughts and finding a 'Way Ahead' for the corporation.

W1A wins largely positive response, but not from all

Twenty Twelve sequel W1A appears to have gone down well with fans of the original - although there were some less enthusiastic voices among the acclaim as the debut episode aired.

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I wouldn't say W1A is a disaster; it suffers from having to follow Twenty Twelve and other BBC series - in particular The Office even a decade on, and The Thick of It.