Adam Buxton

'From the makers of The Inbetweeners!' trumpeted the press release. 'Written by the man renowned for the "slag of all snacks" campaign for Pot Noodle!' it continued in full big-sell mode. OK, so the second claim was a touch desperate, but there was still a sliver of optimism twitching in my remo-finger as I prepared to be persuaded by The Persuasionists (BBC2).

How wrong can you be? Despite gaining kudos for a title that sounded like it was dedicated to a cult 1960s harmony group who only ever recorded two tracks on an obscure Memphis label before imploding in a soul stew of drugs and sibling-related adultery, thus guaranteeing legendary status, The Persuasionists turned out to be as tasty as, well Pot Noodles - and cold ones, at that.

There were warning signs: Iain Lee, for one, here sporting a strange spray tan and spray-on hair and the same self-satisfied sneer that made him so irksome on The 11 O'Clock Show. Surely, though, he'd be balanced out by Adam of Adam & Joe fame and a script, by Jonathan Thake, that promised an insider's assault on the absurdities of advertising.

Well, no and no. 'Adam Buxton - what were you thinking?' was the note I wrote as his character Greg turned out to be as dripping with weary clichés as the rest of Thake's join-the-dots advertising idiots. Thake might have a killer way with advertising slogans but, on the evidence of The Persuasionists, he can't tell the difference between satire and stereotyping. The Persuasionists was rammed to its smug rafters with the latter.

Come to think of it, does advertising even need sending up? Such an easy target, and The Persuasionists, with its shouty Australians, dodgy foreigners with big pencils and smelly Cockney cheese gags, missed it by a country mile. Now watch it clean up at next year's Comedy Awards.

Squandering a good cast that includes Adam Buxton, Daisy Haggard and Simon Farnaby, this is an unreconstructed office-based sitcom set in the world of advertising. Fearsome, insane boss, check; dimbulb secretary, check; comedy foreigner, check . . . This relentlessly ticks all the wrong boxes as the talented cast struggle bravely against a script containing almost no funny jokes. Until recently this was called The Scum Also Rises, but presumably that title was axed for containing some humour and wit, therefore making it an ill fit for what follows. False advertising.

Considering the daftness of the advertising industry, it is surprising that it has inspired so few comedies. The Persuasionists, a six-part sitcom starring Jarred Christmas which starts tonight, redresses this balance. The ad world is peculiarly suited to comedy treatment, complete with outrageous personalities, facile themes, a frenetic pace and a limitless supply of colourful "visiting" personalities (to pep up each episode). In the series, which is written by Jonathan Thake (who used to work in an ad agency) and produced by the company responsible for The Inbetweeners, such outlandish characters are well represented: there's a sexual predator, a brainy loser, a neurotic female executive, a bullish boss and witless account director. The agency is called HHH&H, a wry reference to the vain habit among marketeers of forming their agencies' names around their initials. In tonight's episode, Greg (the witless one, played by Adam Buxton) must pitch a sub-standard campaign for brown, pungent "Cockney cheese" ("for empty nesters who like dairy products") to an antagonistic client Jim, played by Lee Ross. The presentation goes terribly and the team has to use cunning to win over the client, enlisting a female team member as a "honey trap". It all goes desperately wrong and concludes with a booze-stoked confrontation. It's light, sometimes entertaining, vacuous stuff - like the industry it depicts. Just try to ignore the overdone canned laughter.

The Beeb's latest sitcom is hewn from the same rock as The IT Crowd: it's big, bold, colourful and obvious. The setting this time is a hapless advertising agency - waters charted much better in the recent Martin Clunes remake of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. Still, it might be a grower, in the same sledgehammer way that Miranda was - and fans of Iain Lee and Adam Buxton will appreciate their putting in an appearance.

Set in the world of advertising, this new sitcom has its own unique selling point: it's approximately one-third funny. The third succeeds because every time Simon Farnaby steps in as sex-crazed international fixer, Keaton, it's to do something hilarious with a big pencil. The rest fails because the other execs (Adam Buxton, Iain Lee, Jarred Christmas and Daisy Haggard) are something-and-nothing characters, and fail to add anything clever or convincing to the flabbier bits of the script. Nevertheless, there are some genuinely good ideas here, and the team's battle to put together a convincing campaign for a new product, cockney cheese, is leavened by the presence of guest star Lee Ross. He makes a marvellous cockney, possibly because until recently he played Denise's ex, Owen, in EastEnders.

When American scriptwriters decided to put the advertising world on telly, they gave us the perfectly scripted and critically acclaimed Mad Men. This side of the pond we end up with The Persuasionists, which follows the more traditional vein of Brit sitcoms.

It's often said advertising execs have no idea what they're doing and the five idiots in this certainly live up to that image. They work for HHH&H and have to come up with a clever campaign for Cockney Cheese, a bizarre brown cheese that smells of something incredibly unpleasant (I won't spoil the revelation - it's almost certain to give you a chuckle). Creative Billy (Iain Lee, in his first acting role) has come up with a slogan and it's up to uncertain Greg (Adam Buxton) to sell it to the client, Cockney Jim.

Trouble is, he's terrified of Jim, a caricature of an EastEnders baddie... played by former EastEnders baddie Lee Ross (he was Owen Turner). And unlike one colleague, Greg doesn't have a giant pencil to save the day (that's not a euphemism - one of them really has a giant pencil).

The series is written by former ad man Jonathan Thake, who was responsible for Pot Noodle's "the slag of all snacks" campaign, one of the most complained-about TV ads of all time. I'd love to have seen how he managed to sell this little show to the Beeb.

The Persuasionists is an okayish sitcom featuring Adam Buxton. We bow to no man in our adoration of Adam and Joe, but The Persuasionists just limps on screen as yet another office-based sitcom from the BBC. It has just enough promise to keep us interested for next week, but if it doesn't get much better then, we're taking it back to the shop.

An audience with Adam & Joe's Adam Buxton

Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish have carved themselves a small but cherished niche of homespun pop-cultural comedy. Their 6 Music radio show, with its film-and-music banter, call-and-response catchphrases ("Stephen! Just coming") and "Song Wars", in which they compose rival ditties on the same theme (Ikea meatballs, climate change), has the same quirky informality and cut-and-paste creativity as the movies they re-enacted with Star Wars figures on The Adam & Joe Show (1996-2001). They've been a double act since Westminster School but, as Cornish polishes the script for Spielberg's Tintin and their radio show enters what Buxton - the shorter, cuddlier one - hopes is a temporary hiatus, he is picking up his acting career (Stardust, Son of Rambow) this week as a hapless exec in The Persuasionists (BBC Two, Wed, 10pm) a sitcom that takes a broadly comic aim at the world of advertising. It's a world, he concedes, that is almost beyond parody because "it's so stuffed with morons and t***s and people who are behaving in a ridiculous way." He should know, because voiceover work has long paid his bills, as have more ill-fated advertising adventures (see below).

The year's defining moments in culture, politics and television are cut up into a thousand pieces, then reassembled for our amusement, in a spoof of the traditional list show. Miranda Hart guides us through re-imagined versions of party leaders' conference speeches, George Bush issues a semi-musical apology for his time in office, and even Jeremy Paxman gets a light ribbing. Guests include Stephen K Amos, Duncan Bannatyne, and Adam Buxton with a uniquely suburban take on Ed Wardle's Alone in the Wild documentary adventure.

Get Me Back In The Box

A blog post from creator Adam Buxton in which he reveals that BBC Three have dropped the project. He also gives his thoughts on this.