Ben Miller (I)

Rebecca Front & Ben Miller praise 'the master' Mr Bean

"Everyone loves Mr Bean and we were all delighted to watch the master at work whilst hopefully encouraging more people to join in and donate on Red Nose Day," said Ben Miller of the classic comedy revival.

Last in this broad and disappointing series, clearly based on Julian Assange yet yielding a fraction of the comedic potential offered by the man himself. Ben Miller is the self-important document leaker disappointed by the superficial response of the press to his manifesto. He then inadvertently ruins the chances of his El Rican hosts of bidding for the World Cup. His bunkmate, Ludo, whose indeterminate European language sounds mostly Welsh, must use his hacking skills to bail him out.

From BBC Four comes a brand new satirical comedy: Asylum. It was created by Kayvan Novak - the man behind E4's FoneJacker - and stars Ben Miller as Daniel Hern, a whistleblower hated by America and offered solace by a fictional 'El Rican' embassy.

The show appears to be promising, perhaps similar in its politically satirical nature to The Thick of It. However, where Asylum falls short is in its comedic value. Hern's sidekick Ludo, his ridiculously inept lawyer and a One Direction obsessed journalist, should have elicited a laugh or a smile from me in theory, but something in the comedy's delivery just missed the mark. Whilst not awful, I would not watch it again in a hurry. Although, being only 30 minutes long, maybe Asylum will get better as the series progresses and, for lovers of satires, it could be well be worth a watch.

Radio Times review

This BBC Four comedy just gets better. After the introductory episode, things are heating up for our embassy-bound duo Ludo Backslash (Dustin Demri-Burns) and Dan Hern (Ben Miller), with MI6 and the CIA pulling out all the stops to tempt them out of the embassy.

Their plans include playing an ice-cream truck jingle outside the window ("It worked for Uday Hussein!"), catfishing and revealing that there's a mole in the embassy - surely it couldn't be the 50-year-old unpaid intern with a suspicious American accent (an excellent guest role from Arrested Development's David Cross)?

As Dan and Ludo's position becomes less certain, the show seems to become more confident, with gags and topical references coming thick and fast.

Asylum, despite Ben Miller, isn't (yet) funny. The premise is fine, the Julian Assange story played for laughs (not that the real-life tale involves any less bathos, hubris and other words the Greeks did best). Miller plays it for high-minded pompous, as a GCHQ whistleblower holed up for 14 months in the London embassy of "El Rico", a banana republic which purely wants to stick a finger up to America but finds Dan Hern (Miller) an increasingly ungrateful and unwelcome guest, simply bored and boring and having lost his media cachet. So El Rico - look at the funny banana republic, welcoming to an embassy ball the funny North Koreans! - also brings to shelter one Ludo Backslash, a mittel-European wanted by urgent Hollywood dollars for having streamed for fun every major film for years.

Much of the conception is by Kayvan Novak, who also appears as the "herpes in a suit" ambassador's plotting son, and Dustin Demri-Burns is the amiable Backslash, and these two alone, never mind Miller, should have guaranteed laughs. But it was written by none of them, and that shows: it has too few quirks, a too-obvious incompetent lawyer, one plot device (a misheard word) so old it's got rust on its moss, and too many stereotypes which were old in the 70s. Come out of the 70s! With your hands UP.

Asylum review

My hopes were high for this fictionalised version of the Assange story, starring Ben Miller. But I was too busy asking questions to laugh. It could be a good sitcom if you could believe any of it.

New sitcom from Kayvan Novak, based on the peculiar plight of Julian Assange. Ben Miller plays Dan Hern, a Snowden-like whistleblower holed up in a fictional central American embassy in London after leaking CIA documents. When the media begin to tire of his plight, the embassy head (Novak) offers sanctuary to another fugitive: manchild hacker Ludo (Dustin Demri-Burns). The odd-couple combo takes precedence over anything truly satirical, though Miller and Demri-Burns bounce off each other nicely.

Radio Times review

Co-created by Fonejacker's Kayvan Novak, this new comedy takes its lead from the now slightly-less-than-topical story of Julian Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy - but then that's sort of the point.

A year after he was granted asylum in the fictional El Rican embassy, whistleblower Dan Hern (Ben Miller) is largely forgotten by the world and despised by the embassy staff. He finds his world getting a little smaller with the arrival of another more fashionable fugitive - immature hacker Ludo Backslash (played by Cardinal Burns' Dustin Demri-Burns with a sort of childish glee, and clearly based on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom).

Asylum is a fairly gentle ride without any big belly laughs, but the claustrophobic surroundings of the embassy make a great breeding ground for comic situations, and Miller is in his element as the self-important Dan, whose search for justice is only superseded by his need for access to dodgy websites.

Ben Miller interview

The star of a new BBC Four comedy, Asylum, gives the lowdown on his favourite gadgets.

Ben Miller is a 'budget Julian Assange' in Asylum

TV & Satellite Week catches up with ex Death in Paradise star Ben Miller, who plays a whistleblower, Daniel Hern, seeking refuge in a London embassy in a new BBC comedy, Asylum (BBC Four, Monday)...