Arthur Mathews

Occasionally you see a sitcom you love so much you want to hug it, slap it on the back and buy it a round of drinks. For people who warmed to last year's pilot for Toast of London, it's that kind of comedy. Now Matt Berry's brilliant creation, a conceited old-school actor called Steven Toast, has been given a series where Berry and co-writer Arthur Mathews can let their disturbing mix of theatreland spoof and surreal bedroom farce run rampant.

From the very first exchange ("I thought you said you were a bee-keeper?" Toast asks a conquest: "No," she replies sweetly, "A beak-keeper - I keep beaks"), the inventive oddities tumble out, notably in the form of Kikini Bamalaam, daughter of the Nigerian ambassador and latest partner of Toast's friend Ed. A botched cosmetic procedure has left her looking (very disturbingly) like a Generation Game Bruce Forsyth.

Toast of London was picked up from Channel 4's comedy pilot season last year. It's a mildly surreal sitcom about a pretentious actor played by Matt Berry (doing that same "cinema advert voiceover" voice he did in The IT Crowd and the much-missed Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - can it be his actual voice?) Berry also co-wrote it with Arthur Mathews, who co-wrote Father Ted and the late 1990s sketch show, Big Train, which launched half of Britain's current comedy actors.

Toast shares that off-kilter sensibility within a more conventional format: its hero goes through the usual sitcom set-ups, but with a disturbed edge.

For instance, when he meets a potential love interest, she's played by Emma Fryer with a manic laugh and demented body language, as if miming a crane. And she's called Susan Random, one of many deliberately odd character names (Clem Fandango, Jemima Gina, Kikini Bamalam). There's also a sudden, brief musical number which flares up intriguingly and a really unsettling Bruce Forsyth lookalike.

But there are two big flaws: Toast himself isn't that interesting a character and there aren't enough actual laughs. This could develop into something weird and wonderful but for now it's just the former.

A mere pilot episode, but in our list because this was the show that finally harnessed and distilled the animal comic talent of Matt Berry. Previously best known as the mad boss from The IT Crowd (where Graham Linehan wrote his lines - here they were co-written by Father Ted's other creator, Arthur Mathews), now he was fruity actor Steven Toast. Toast's humiliations included auditioning for the part of a gay, corrupt detective in a prison visiting room (because the director had been sent down for making racist remarks on his previous job) and a howlingly funny scene where a voiceover job forced Toast to spend the whole afternoon saying one word over and over. Would Toast of London make a hit series? "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeeee-eeeees. YES! Yes. Yes."

Channel 4's Funny Fortnight is delivering such a rush of promising pilots you don't envy the boss who has to choose between them. I'd say for volume of belly laughs, this is the pick of the bunch so far, a slapstick, surreal take on artistes and agents in London's theatreland. Matt Berry (The IT Crowd) has combined forces with Arthur Mathews (co-creator of Father Ted) and plays hapless actor Steven Toast. The scene where Toast does an audition in a prison visiting room is good but better is the Soho voiceover session where he has to deliver one word. Again and again.

IT Crowd star Matt Berry gets to be booming and absurd once again in this highly promising new sitcom pilot written by Berry and Arthur Mathews (Father Ted, Big Train) and showcased as part of C4's Funny Fortnight season. He's actor Steven Toast, who regularly pops up on the London stage and in classy TV dramas. But when we meet him when he's committed a major career faux pas - by starring in a West End play so outrageous it has left critics and the public utterly appalled.

Proving that Channel 4's "funny fortnight" doesn't just consist of two year old footage of Peter Kay, the channel have bagged acclaimed writer Arthur Mathews, a contributor to Father Ted and writing partner of the brilliant Graham Linehan for this one-off. Toast Of London charts a day in the life of Steve Toast - played by Matt Berry - a recently divorced actor who embarks on a controversial West End play. So controversial, in fact, that the producer is in imprison for racial chanting, leading Toast to rehearse the part of a corrupt gay detective in a prison meeting room - a suitably hysterical scene helped by the superb Geoffrey McGivern. Let's just hope for a series in 2013...

My pick of C4's Funny Fortnight is Arthur Mathews and Matt Berry's sitcom pilot about an actor (Berry - Douglas Reynolm in The IT Crowd, but a revelation here) whose career sinks after appearing in a vilified West End play. It's as expansive and surreal as you'd expect from the creator of Father Ted, and I loved the audition (for a director in jail for Holocaust denial) in a prison visiting room.

We really are through the looking glass here, as Toast Of London is yet another promising sitcom pilot. Co-written with Father Ted co-creator Arthur Mathews, it's a winningly silly vehicle for Matt Berry from The IT Crowd, and follows a farcical day in the life of a successful West End stage actor.

Yes, it finds the one-note Berry delivering the only performance he can - a bombastic, bawdy, swaggering ham with a voice like vintage brandy - but I can't deny that, with a busily gag-strewn script such as this, he exploits his limited strengths to the full. Not to be outdone, the whole cast - including the great Geoffrey McGivern, last seen in Dead Boss - deliver similarly broad performances, and the whole thing is so relentlessly daft it's hard to resist its rambling charms. More please, C4!

A strong new one-off sitcom created by Father Ted writer Arthur Mathews and The IT Crowd's Matt Berry, who also stars as Steven Toast, legend of stage and screen. Having been a success for years, Toast is on his uppers after taking the lead role in a controversial West End play. Eager to get his career back on track he lets his London agent (Fiona Mollison) convince him to audition for a popular TV drama - the only problem being that the producer is in prison. Enjoyably bonkers, with a good supporting cast including Robert Bathurst and Tracy-Ann Oberman.

When Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews created Father Ted in 1995, they breathed new life into the stereotype of the comedy vicar, a character that for too long had been suffocated by the tyrannical stranglehold of Derek Nimmo. Unfortunately Richard Curtis simultaneously came up with The Vicar of Dibley, a programme as twee and mediocre as any number of Nimmo's cassock-based comedies.

Perhaps realising that the realm of the ecclesiastical sitcom hasn't been successfully exploited in a while, acclaimed comic actor Tom Hollander has co-created Rev, in which he plays a harassed vicar at a struggling inner city London church.

Sadly, despite the talent involved - the cast also includes Alexander Armstrong, Finding Eric's Steve Evets, Peep Show's Olivia Colman and comedian Miles Jupp - this low-key comedy is a disappointment. The blame must lie with writer James Wood, who also wrote the similarly underwhelming media satire Freezing, in which Hollander's ferocious comic performance was the sole highlight.

The jokes in Rev are sparse, weak and principally based around the supposedly amusing conceit of a vicar acting in ways you wouldn't expect. So, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, played with amiable anxiety by the always watchable Hollander, smokes, drinks, swears and enjoys sex with his wife.

So, I imagine, do a lot of modern priests - indeed, a group of them are credited as technical advisors - but that doesn't mean the concept is funny in itself. Father Ted admittedly employed similar material, albeit far more inventively than Wood does.

The opening episode takes underpowered swipes at middle-class pretentions and hypocrisies when Smallbone faces a moral dilemma over the sudden rise in church attendance due to a glowing Ofsted report on a local church school. But the episode just dawdles along and not even Hollander's bumbling charm can save it. Rev, like many sitcoms before, may improve as it goes on, but there's precious little here to encourage you to find out.