Alexander Armstrong

Mutual Friends started with a suicide but ended with a fire engine. Carl's suicide was the writers' device with which to bring together his surviving friends, Martin, played by Marc Warren, and Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). Martin was the worrying type and he had loads to worry about: not only was he about to lose his job as a solicitor but his wife, Jen (Keeley Hawes), announced that she had slept with Carl and that their marriage was in trouble (all Martin's fault).

Patrick also had his problems: a personal financial crisis had got his E-Type Jag repossessed and one of his business partners was edging him out of his own Boden-style catalogue company while edging himself into his former girlfriend's knickers. The worrying thing about Patrick, buoyed along by ego and testosterone, was his inability to worry. Yet this follicly challenged Lothario was not, it transpired, irredeemably self-centred. It was he, after all, who was responsible for the fire engine's comical appearance - called not to hose a conflagration but to fulfil Martin's disgruntled young son's ambition to ride on one.

Warren, Armstrong and Hawes are watchable actors but you couldn't help but wish their parts had been occupied by Jimmy Nesbitt, Robert Bathurst and Helen Baxendale and that, as in Cold Feet, there had been room for a genuinely funny subplot (as regularly supplied by the actors Fay Ripley and John Thomson). Nor could you fail to spot how inspiration was running out even as early as episode one. Martin, for instance, kept being overheard saying things that he shouldn't by the people he was badmouthing. Only once could you accuse the programme of inventiveness and that was in the character of Carl's widow Leigh, played with cheerful understatement by Claire Rushbrook, who had clearly lost her how-to-grieve manual and went round saying how 'cross' she was with him.

My hunch is that Mutual Friends will keep its audience, not least because it is unusual in putting at its centre male rather than female friendships. But how, even as I watched its titles (as ripped off from Mad Men), I wished for more subtlety, more black humour, more depth of emotion!

Mutual Friends at first feels like a hybrid of just about every TV series and film about angst-ridden friends approaching midlife crises, from The Big Chill through Thirtysomething and on to Cold Feet. But, for all its familiarity, it could be a grower, thanks to Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong as friends pitched into emotional turmoil after the suicide of their best pal.

Warren, who's best known for playing wide boys and sleazebags, shows a real gift for comedy (Mutual Friends is described as, oh dear, a 'comedy drama', which as we all know means it's not much of either). He does a morning-after-a-drunken-night-before scene that's so achingly realistic, complete with a drool-covered sofa, it's hard not to feel dry-mouthed and wretched in sympathy. Mutual Friends is an ensemble piece, also starring Keeley Hawes as Warren's unhappy wife and Sarah Alexander as Armstrong's ex-partner, but it's the comic chemistry between Warren and Armstrong (playing an ageing lothario) that could just turn out to be the best reason for watching.

Starring many familiar faces, Keeley Hawes from Ashes To Ashes, Marc Warren from Hustle and Alexander Armstrong from comedies, this is a mixed bag.

Any show that starts with a reunion of old friends at a funeral is going to end up being compared to 80s film The Big Chill.

This new six-parter starring Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong as chalk-and-cheese mates will also hook the Cold Feet crowd - with a nod to Desperate Housewives provided by the mystery of why their old pal Carl threw himself under a train.

I'm guessing it's because his wife Leigh (Claire Rushbrook) was secretly guzzling all his anti-depressants. The supposedly grieving widow is in such high spirits during this first hour, you wouldn't be surprised to see her suggest a game of naked Twister at his funeral.

Martin, a grumpy lawyer played by Warren, is harder hit by his friend's death, especially after his wife Jen (Keeley Hawes) blurts out (for no good reason) that she slept with Carl, sending their already dodgy marriage into a nosedive.

Warren wasn't the first choice for this part, which was originally earmarked for Armstrong's comedy partner Ben Miller. But he's as magnetically watchable here as usual, especially when tormented by visions of Jen and Carl together. Armstrong's character Patrick is a blabbermouthed perpetual teenager with a mail-order clothing business and a silver E-type Jag - cunningly shot here to look longer than the QE2. Only his ex-fiancee Liz (Sarah Alexander) is unimpressed.

Though billed as a comedy drama, there's more drama than comedy - but plenty to enjoy in this first, pacy instalment.

Minig the same seam of midlife crises and relationship problems as which produced Cold Feet and Coupling, this new comedy drama revolves around estranged friends brought together after an old pal jumps in front of a train.

Marc Warren plays Martin, an uptight lawyer with a needy wife and kids, while Alexander Armstrong is Patrick, a self-confident bachelor with a sports car and a string of exes.

It's classic odd couple territory but, thanks to a snappy script and superb performances, this works.

OK, I'm confused now. Having checked and then double checked the TV schedules, it appears to be true; Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach are on ITV1. Yes, ITV1. They're the people who last year washed us away on a sea of swill with Benidorm and unleashed Liza Tarbuck upon us for Bonkers, possibly the worst yet, conversely, best comedy-drama title of the year. But here we have a pair of interconnected shows with a sprightly idea at the core of their very beings. ITV haven't had that on their comedy roster since Rik Mayall transformed himself into a Thatcher-grovelling B'stard.

Echo Beach on its own is, of course, garbage. A glossy soap-style affair with Jason Donovan and Martine McCutcheon and Hugo Speer and Susie Amy adds up to less than zero, but in the context of Moving Wallpaper (a smart comedy about the making of Echo Beach), it grows more arms and legs than a sand-obsessed, flesh-friendly slab of small screen narcissism ought to. Little moments murmur into Echo Beach and reflect back onto sequences we have seen in Moving Wallpaper as the fictional writers try to make hay on a Cornwall-based rural soap about love and betrayal. Recently hired producer Jonathan Pope (Ben Miller, suitably inspired after his dire sketch series with old buddy Alexander Armstrong) wants to kick some arse into proceedings by ditching the uglier actors and stodgy scripts and injecting his new baby with sex and scandal. It's fruity and fun and so not ITV.

If, like Ant and Dec, you've never quite established which is which, let me clear it up for you - Alexander Armstrong is the one who did the Pimms' ads while Ben Miller was the creepy civil servant in Primeval and starred in that sitcom with Sarah Alexander, The Worst Week of My Life. After some very dubious opening titles involving dodgy dancing, there are a surprising number of funny sketches, many of them rather risque for BBC1, including splendid skewering of those 'readers emails' bits on breakfast news programmes.

When this show started, I thought we'd been transported back ten years - Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller were on the screen together, for a start, but the opening credits also seemed incredibly old-fashioned. Indeed, some would say that the very idea of a sketch show is pretty much passed its sell-by date in any case; that those sublime final Fast Show specials should have marked the genre's end.

But no, Armstrong and Miller are ploughing ahead regardless, and good on 'em. It's always hard to judge a sketch show from its first epsiode, as there'll inevitably be a few sketches which don't appeal, and some characters won't even have been introduced yet. But on the evidence we have so far, I'd give this a tentative thumbs up.

I can't pretend that the laughs were constant throughout this episode, and there were a couple of sketches which you felt you'd seen somewhere before, but when Armstrong and Miller let their imaginations run into darker territory, you could see definite potential for a successful series.

Alexander Armstrong interview

Alexander Armstrong tells The Telegraph about the joys of returning to the classic comedy sketch show and his favourite Friday night TV.