Ashley Jensen

It is the season of goodwill, I am aware. So, let us place all necessary aides for attaining this desirable state within easy reach - mulled wine, mince pie, Quality Street highlights of your choice - and muster all the warm festive glow we can before turning to Accidental Farmer (BBC1). This was an hour-long comedy drama, the pilot for a potential series, about an urban sophisticate, who, after finding a young, naked lady crouching in her boyfriend's wardrobe when she returns early from work, goes on a drunken online spending spree with his credit card and buys a rundown farm. Narked by the howls of derision that greet the idea of her keeping the farm and becoming a farmer, she decides to... keep the farm and become a farmer.

On the upside, it stars Ashley Jensen, an actor whose chops and comic timing have been famously and repeatedly proven in international hits such as Ugly Betty and Extras. On the downside, her innate warmth and permanently anxious, vulnerable air make her an odd choice to play Erin, a hard-edged advertising executive. More importantly, even the best comic actor needs decent set-ups and lines to keep a comedy drama together, and Accidental Farmer plodded through a series of sub-Cold Comfort Farm/Darling Buds of May cliches slower than a Gloucester Old Spot through mud.

See Erin climb over fences wearing impractical high-heeled shoes on her first trip to Appley Farm (a name indicative of such a dearth of imagination that it should have sent up warning flares in the minds of any early script reader - I'm sorry, another orange crunch please)! Watch her gaze in horror and whip out the sanitising hand gel as protection against the honest, Yorkshire muck around her! See yokels discover she is single and assume she is a lesbian! And finally, yes, watch her - whoa, whoa, whoops, there she goes! - fall into a giant mud patch.

There's also a sitting, spitting tenant - octogenarian Olive - to deal with, a dishy vet (whom she at first mistakes for a doctor, can you believe?!) and a doctor who has secret, dastardly plans to buy the farm and turn it into a hotel. But I suspect, by this point, you probably knew that.

With a lot of work on the script and a lot more mince pies and mulled wine thrown down my gullet, it might have the potential for a cosy Darling Buds of - nyygh - Appley Farm-type Sunday teatime offering. But as it stands, it was a comedy drama without an awful lot of either.

It's hard not to like Ashley Jensen, the Scottish actress who was catapulted to fame when she played Ricky Gervais's accident-prone best friend Maggie in Extras. Blessed with an open face, a slightly awkward manner and a wry sense of humour - much like Martin Freeman, her male equivalent in The Office, in fact - she's fast become a popular hit with audiences and a shoo-in for TV producers looking to cast a sympathetic female lead. So it may come as a surprise to viewers of this sitcom pilot episode to find her playing a high-powered ad executive called Erin, who has a penchant for shouting things like, "Unless the answer is yes, I don't want to know!" Glimmers of vulnerability appear, though, as she finds her boyfriend Mike (Raza Jaffrey) in bed with another woman and goes on a vengeful spending spree with his money - buying, among other things, a dilapidated farm which, in a moment of blind inspiration, she decides to actually take on. And so Erin arrives in Yorkshire to meet Olive (Jean Heywood), her cantankerous sitting tenant; Clive (Michael Hodgson), the ale-soaked local handyman; Judith (Sylvestra Le Touzel), her horsey neighbour; and a cast of other bucolic types. The result is a sitcom that, given a bit of spit and polish and a generous BBC One budget, might just inherit The Vicar of Dibley's mud-flecked crown.

There's a whiff of John Sullivan's The Green Green Grass about this new show starring Ashley Jensen as Erin, a high-powered ad executive who - on a drunken internet shopping spree - buys a run-down farm in Yorkshire. As well as out-of-place Erin, there are stereotypes everywhere: a horsey next door neighbour (Sylvestra Le Touzel), a blustering family doctor (Robert Pugh), a shallow, metropolitan ex-boyfriend (Raza Jaffrey) and a nice, unsophisticated vet (Married Single Other's Shaun Dooley). It's as plodding as Erin's herd of cows, but the suggestion of subterfuge and intrigue could bode well if it becomes a series.

There's nothing like a bit of retail therapy to cheer the blues away, especially when you discover your boyfriend is cheating on you. However when that happens in this comedy drama, Ashley Jensen doesn't log onto her computer and head straight to Net-A-Porter like most women with an ounce of sense, but instead buys a run down farm in Yorkshire. Righty-ho. Cue plenty of city girl stuck-in-the-country style jokes.

Ashley Jensen plays an advertising executive who moves to the country for a variety of reasons. It's a fish-out-of-water comedy/drama. Not that it's dramatic. Or comedic. In fact, watching one of your poor little pet goldfish flailing wildly and slowly dying on your living room carpet alongside your crying infant children is funnier than this. And that's not funny at all, is it? Do you see what we're saying here?

After her stints on US sitcoms Ugly Betty and Accidentally On Purpose, Ashley Jensen is back on UK soil - in every sense.

In this comedy pilot, she stars as Erin, a high-flying control freak advertising executive whose perfect life unravels when she discovers her boyfriend is a cheating git. Drunk, hurt and in possession of his credit card, she buys herself a run-down farm in Yorkshire. As you do.

Initially, a hungover Erin wants to get out of the purchase, but when her ex mocks her ability to make it as a farmer, she decides to prove him wrong. Armed with designer wellies and hand sanitiser, she heads for a new life in the country and, hey presto, another duck-out-of-water comedy is born.

It's a slow start, not helped by the fact that Erin is a horrible cow (of the human variety). But when she meets her new octogenarian sitting tenant, Olive, things quickly pick up. Joined by a cute comedy piglet and stereotypical TV country types (bar Olive, who is wonderfully refreshing) Erin becomes softer and more likeable and the overall result turns out to be a rather jolly show.

Jensen made her name starring opposite Ricky Gervais in Extras, but don't expect anything like the same kind of edgy humour here.

Even so, this pilot shows promise so don't be surprised if the Beeb ­commissions a full series.

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