Anthony Head

It's sad to see this excellently scripted and naturally played sitcom come to an end tonight but it does, at least, end in style. Helen and Alex's testy, will-they-won't-they relationship reaches an interesting and poignant denouement, and Anthony Head's gleefully horrible Stephen is given a great opportunity to go into lasciviousness overdrive with Stephanie Beacham. More please.

Tonight is the series finale of this modern romantic comedy, in which two attractive people (Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan) are failing to have an affair. She drinks a lot of red wine and asks herself repeatedly: "When is anything ever going to start being good again?" For his part, he is trying not to walk out on people whenever the going gets tough. The Daily Express got overexcited about the bad language in the show, asking its readers: "Is this the foulest 'comedy' ever?", ignoring the fact that it was essentially a rather sweet love story between two befuddled people. It is true that the boss of the agency (Anthony Head) wallows in the mire like an ecstatic hippo, but I've been reliably informed that his character is based on a real person.

Free Agents, Channel 4's new Friday-night comedy, began with a bit of awkward post-coital conversation. Alex (played by Stephen Mangan) has just slept with his colleague Helen (played by Sharon Horgan). He doesn't regret it, she does (in a cheerful, maybe-back-for-seconds kind of way). That's the sit. The com comes from Chris Niel's salty, rueful script, which very nicely exploits the best features of its cast, and also creates a genuinely comic monster in the shape of Stephen, the boss of the talent agency where Alex and Helen work. Stephen (Anthony Head, shaking off the memory of those twee coffee ads and crushing its skull beneath his heel) is foul-mouthed, lubricious, misogynistic and amoral. And funny.

The first thing you notice about Free Agents is the script. Witty, clever, caustic, shocking and seriously scatological, it is very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that for much of Free Agents you don't notice anything else.

Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan star as colleagues at an actors' agency who share an ill-judged night of passion and awake having to deal with the professional and personal consequences. Anthony Head co-stars, and steals scenes, as their lascivious, seedy and sex-obsessed boss who offers them his own perverse brand of agony uncle advice.

Mangan and Horgan are both very fine actors, but seem forever at the service of the shows dialogue. It's a bit churlish to complain about an excess of brilliant one-liners, but the initially breathtaking effect does soon wear off, and it becomes something of an effort to keep up with. Hopefully future episodes will give the characters a little more room to develop, and Free Agents will realise its full potential. It is already 50% funnier that most other comedies, so it can afford to relax a little.

Is this the foulest "comedy" ever?

TV watchdog Ofcom is preparing for a wave of complaints this week over the shocking language used in a Channel 4 sitcom.

The c-word featured three times in the new comedy, Free Agents, first aired last Friday.

Actor Anthony Head plays the head of a talent agency in the six-part series, written by Chris Niel and described as a caustic romantic comedy.

Head, who became famous in the cult show Buffy The Vampire Slayer, said: "Free Agents is a very adult show but it is very ­funny, and I get to say words I've never said on ­television before. It's very ­liberating."

In the first few minutes, Head's character Stephen Cauldwell said: "Good morning, my dear c***s." The f-word also featured 22 times in the half-hour episode.

Tabloid targets C4 sitcom

The Sunday Express has decided that new Channel 4 comedy Free Agents could be "the foulest sitcom ever".

In a news story, the right-wing tabloid states that: "The content of the show is bound to offend viewers."

And, before waiting for any figures, decided that: "TV watchdog Ofcom is preparing for a wave of complaints over the shocking language."

The show, starring Anthony Head, Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan, included the word 'cunt' three times and 'fuck' 22 times in its first episode, which aired at 10pm on Friday.

A convincing new sitcom about a pair of ditzy talent agents, Alex (Stephen Mangan) and Helen (Sharon Horgan), who become romantically involved while contending with their bizarre, sexually charged London workplace. At morning meetings, Stephen (Anthony Head), the company boss, expects his agents to stump up lurid stories of their sexual exploits. In reality, Alex and Helen are rather sadder and much more ordinary. Alex has been sleeping in the office ever since his divorce, and Helen is getting over her fiance's recent death. Mutual loneliness leads the two of them into bed. Part farce, part satire, Free Agents has a sweetly understated tone.

Free Agents is a new romantic comedyseries, wallowing in obscenity, about a dysfunctional couple failing to have an affair. Personally I enjoyed it a lot, although I probably wouldn't recommend it to my 84-year-old mother. The couple concerned are a divorced father-of-two (Stephen Mangan) and a work colleague (Sharon Horgan) whose fiance dropped dead at the age of 34.

The Mangan character is broke, homeless and about as sexually sophisticated as a 15-year-old born-again Christian, while his nongirlfriend is suffering from posttraumatic death disorder. They work together in an actors agency run by a cynical old goat (Anthony Head), out of whose mouth poursa stream of uncensored filth. It works because, deep beneath the brittle layer of self-conscious trendiness, it is an old-fashioned love story with its own perverse brand of charm.

Rude, but very funny in parts, this new comedy centres around Alex (Stephen Mangan) whose marriage has broken down. He's fallen into a relationship with co-worker Helen, played by Sharon Horgan, who still can't get over her dead ex. And their sex-crazed boss - Anthony Head - is a complete nightmare.

If you get deja vu at the sight of Stephen Mangan sobbing in bed, you either know him very well (in which case, lucky you) or, more likely, you've seen him doing it before, in the pilot that went out in November 2007.

Mangan and Pulling star Sharon Horgan return playing talent agents who though they are technically single come with phenomenal amounts of emotional baggage. He's divorced and desperately missing his kids and her fiance has recently died.

It's not the most promising premise for a sitcom, I'll grant you. What it sounds like is the formula for a not very good Hollywood weepie: In a World Where Love Has Died... Can Two Broken Hearts Become One? etc.

Still, we'll just have to make the best of these raw ingredients and a relationship based on expediency (he has nowhere else to sleep) rather than any great spiritual or physical attraction.

The main problem I had with the pilot was that their kinky foul-mouthed boss (played by Anthony Head, enjoying himself enormously) was given so much rope they might as well have shoved a satsuma in his mouth while they were at it.

He's been reined in slightly in the re-write, but it's the watchableness of the two leads that rises above any weaknesses in the script and makes this worth a second date, with Sharon Horgan's cool cynicism nicely balancing Stephen Mangan's weepy wetness. They make a great couple - on screen anyway.