Average ratings for Thursday night's comedy

The new BBC2 sitcom Fear, Stress and Anger debuted with a somewhat disappointing 1.9 million viewers last night (a 9% share of the audience) according to unofficial overnight figures.

In fact it was bad news all round for the new comedy today as the critics in today's papers weren't particularly kind either. A sample of the comments below...

"Fear, Stress and Anger, and all the rest of them [new sitcoms], are just a bit rubbish. Are we having a laugh? Not really, no." - Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

"As with classic moments of The Office and I'm Alan Partridge, I felt the need to shut my eyes. I also felt the need to plug my ears, leave the room and demand back from the BBC whatever portion of my licence fee had gone into making this mouldy corpse of a comedy show." - Matt Baylis, Daily Express

"It is more a way of passing the time than genuine entertainment." - Robert Hanks, The Independent

"It was as an old-fashioned and formulaic a sitcom as they come." - Gerard O'Donovan, The Daily Telegraph

BBC2's other new Thursday night comedy shows didn't do much better in the ratings either. The new series of Dead Ringers and Graham Norton's new chat show were seen by 2m viewers.

Over on the other side Benidorm, the ITV comedy starring Johnny Vegas, managed to stem its drop in the ratings. It was watched by 3.7 million viewers (a 19% share) – this is a 100,000 gain on last week although the total is still not back to the numbers that ITV1 expects in its 10pm slot.