AA Gill

Seasoned sitcom writers no. 2 - Pete Sinclair

I first met Pete Sinclair in about 2002, when we were both writing episodes of the largely forgotten, temporarily loved (and critically disliked) My Hero. This was not the first sitcom Pete had worked on. He'd created two of his own and went on to co-write four series of the much loved, critically-acclaimed Lead Balloon. Even AA Gill liked it, and he hates everything.

Krod Mandoon is a spoof, a difficult thing to pull off because the humour is limited to the range of the drama it's sending up. Mandoon is a Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, a bit Robin Hood, a bit Lord of the Rings, a bit Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. What it most resembles is a cartoon-like Shrek. It has a good cast and a remarkably generous set and costume budget. It all looks as if it has been performed in some tax-deductible bit of eastern Europe. Everyone turns in a perfectly fine performance, though Kröd himself has the hardest time, being both a hunk and an idiot. Playing a fool isn't the same as being a fool. Then there's Roger Allam, who seems to be going for the TV record for inappropriate casting. At any moment, I expect him to turn up in Hollyoaks.

What kills Krod stone dead before he's out of the first episode, what makes this a long hour of desperate, rictus tedium, is the script. The quick-fire, don't-draw-a-breath, rat-a-tat-tat wit and repartee of this god-awful script is solely and exclusively made up of single entendres about sex. Brilliant juvenile dirty sex talk is one of my favourite things, but this, this woeful, repetitive, telegraphed, winking, prudish smut, was just dire. Here was a great invented fantasy world, full of comic potential, but the script unerringly missed it for the state-of-the-arse joke of least resistance.

Hope Springs has a terribly contorted title, particularly as it's supposed to be a made-up place in the Highlands, where neither hope nor springs are likely. This is a vehicle for Alex Kingston, a talented and powerful actor whom you probably remember from ER. It's the story of a gang of former con women on the run with the loot. It's written by three women whose names skimmed past the credits before I could write them down, but I suspect they haven't written for television before. Now, if I'm wrong, I apologise; I just wonder that anyone employed them to do it twice. This is a grand pastiche of a dozen hoary, ancient, cliched stories. There's a lot of Ealing here, a bit of Whisky Galore, Thelma and Louise, The Ladykillers, some of Monarch of the Glen, a splash of Hamish Macbeth, and on and on. The characters are barely drawn at all; only Kingston stands out as having been written with anything more substantial than lipstick on the mirror.

What stops all the laughter escaping your mouth is that you know what's going to happen before the writers do. Every clunky old plot twist and McGuffin and red herring turns up like clockwork, as predestined as Evensong. Didn't anyone older than 15 bother to read this before they made it, and say, hang about, perhaps the comfort of the old and familiar is not what all our viewers want?

Perhaps we could do something to surprise them. Why don't we make one of the girls a vampire or a transvestite? Why don't we make it funny? Even poor old Scotland is dragged through all its ancient, peaty whim­sy, 100 years of patronage and stereotyping.

May Contain Nuts was the best of the crop of new comedies on TV this week: a strong, almost brilliant cast of comedy actors, rather than comedians; a subject that, while having been done before, was given a pleasantly contemporary makeover. It's the story of the adult who goes back to school, as in Vice Versa or Never Been Kissed. In this case, however, it has been tagged onto that subject for mockery, the middle-class obsession with getting their children into private schools. Though have you noticed that nobody ever makes a drama about how awful state education is? I suspect this is because all scriptwriters used to be teachers. Shirley Henderson is the mother who, because she's teeny-weeny and looks like a woodland creature, decides to take her daugh­ter's entrance exam to get into Chelsea Girls' School. The neighbours are an awful crowd of pushy women and tit-wit husbands. There is one funny scene at a sports day where the mothers attach reins to their children and drag them over the finishing line. Overall, though, it isn't very amusing, or as amusing as it ought to be, and that's not the fault of the plotting, the timing or the acting. It's down to the emphasis, its mission statement; it dithers between satire and comedy.

These are not the same thing, and they don't sit together. Satire is a posh spoof and has a short attention span. This series needed to commit to the humour. It's a shame, because you could tell everyone was gagging to go on and make this really hilarious, but it was stopped by the hand-wringing of its own liberal concerns - and that's one of the reasons there's not one sitcom worth a grin on television. The Tristrams are too frightened, too right-on, too even-handed to laugh at much. Laughter itself is suspicious; people might do it for the wrong reasons, might laugh at the wrong things. Laughter is so raucous, aggressive, judgmental. Isn't it much nicer, more acceptable, to smile and clap?

Now here's an interesting way to celebrate the 30th birthday of a classic sitcom. For the first time ever, John Cleese reveals his favourite scenes Fawlty Towers. No clues yet as to which ones they will be but there's the added bonus of the likes of Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Mitchell and Webb, Eddie Izzard and AA Gill reminiscing about these magic moments. Possibly even more interesting will be the comments from the owners of Gleanagles Hotel, which was the real-life inspiration for Fawlty Towers.

A programme called Lead Balloon is a hostage to critical misfortune, but then I expect Jack Dee knows that. This miserabilist sitcom about the Pooterish home life of a stand-up comic, written and performed by a stand-up comic, is better than it sounds. Observational humour is as funny as the observer, not necessarily what's observed. This series is part of a new trend of comedy shows that don't make you laugh; you just nod your head and mutter, That's really funny. It's a Darwinian improvement on the tyranny of the set-up-gag guffaw, and I approve of it. Laughter is ugly and common.