Charlie Higson

Bringing this Radio 4 comedy (it was then called Down the Line) to TV has cost it some of its mojo. That said, there are funny moments to savour. These include pub bore Chris Nibbs's (Charlie Higson) assertion that British greatness is epitomised by the ability to produce a fine custard cream. Also amusing is Simon Day's cockney villain threatening extreme violence if Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) looks him in the eye.

In the second episode of Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson's comedy, the fictitious Radio 4 talk-show host, Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) has left the studio to meet some of his listeners, ostensibly to find out what it means to be British. In reality it's just a good excuse to showcase a terrific stream of comic performances, each of which is brilliantly observed. Tonight, there's a hotel-management student who reveres the land of Shakespeare and Jimmy Savile, a posh architect from the Cotswolds who happens to be black, a brigadier and colonel representing the face of the modern British Army ("We're primarily concerned with building bridges") and, best of all, a poet and national treasure from Yorkshire who seems remarkably familiar.

The Fast Show is back. Only they've tweaked the format, introduced a spurious linking theme and changed the title to Bellamy's People. But otherwise, it's Charlie Higson, Paul Whitehouse and their repertory company, frequently unrecognisable beneath mountains of prosthetic make-up, parading a quick-fire array of quirky, comic creations.

Based on Radio 4's spoof, Down the Line, the show has late-night phone-in host Gary Bellamy abandon his cosy studio for the open roads of Great Britain and, as the credits are at great pains to point out, Northern Ireland, to meet the people.

These include reformed bank robbers, self-appointed community leaders, opinionated plasterers, hysterical female fans and two elderly sisters, divided by their extreme political views, who converse in a gibberish language of their own making.

Bellamy's People isn't startlingly original and is gently amusing rather than thigh- slappingly funny, but it is still worth watching for the beautifully observed performances and the occasional flash of genius in the script. My favourite line came from Higson's elderly country gentleman, proudly showing off his computer. "If we don't keep up with the times," he muses, "we might as well just lie down in the road and be run over by the next pantechnicon."

Bellamy's People was originally a very funny radio satire about radio phone-ins, a simple idea that nailed a whole host of subjects and bigotry. Transferring it to television has one innate and possibly insuperable problem: the pictures. Watching a radio show is not a lot more exciting than watching rocks grow. So they dispensed with the radio bit, just keeping the phone-in host, a forgettable lad who goes out to meet English characters, mostly played by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson in rubber prosthetics. They ran through the familiar gamut of their characters for no apparent reason except amusingly to enunciate and repeat familiar clichés. After half an hour, they stopped, which was a relief.

This is The Fast Show remade as Little Britain. It's the flaccid end of a series of strained stereotypical impressions that were once immensely funny and original, and are now annoying and repetitive and reminiscent of a time in your life when this was where real catchphrases came from. The whole genre of characters without purpose needs to be revitalised, retuned, rebored and recalled.

In taking this show from what started out as a radio parody show and putting it on TV, the essential element of humour seems to have been exsanguinated from it.

That's not to say that some of the actors didn't put in good performances, they did - notably an understated Rhys Thomas as Bellamy - but the show seems to have been too liberally daubed with tar from the same brush as Little Britain, and I have to say, that show didn't appeal to me either.

It's not that I'm lacking in the ability to be amused by the quirky, but when done often enough, quirky becomes clichéd. And I felt that most of the characters in Bellamy's People - though some were original in concept - became an embodiment of all that I suspect the writers, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, were trying to avoid.

The show seemed to want to seek out eccentricity and capitalise on it, and fair enough, if it had been a little less eccentric, might well have worked, but some were simply too 'eccentric' to be remotely believable. Take for example the sisters living together; one a fan of a Nazi regime, one a communist and n'er the twain shall meet without forced dialogue it would seem.

That said though, I did find the sweetly drippy Mr Khan character was fun; his call to get more Muslim shows on TV, such as Strictly No Dancing was amusing.

But to every silver lining there's a cloud and white van man was way too overdone, but arguably one of the more realistic characters. We've all met the type of course, but again, white van man has been done to death.

Overall, I guess there's a possibility that as it goes on, Bellamy's People might grow wings and fly, but though it's not a total dodo, it might well be on the verge of extinction unless it manages to attract that most sought after of comedy prefixes, 'cult'. If it does, it might live, but otherwise, I think this one could well be destined for a retrograde step back into its original habitat, and perhaps it should never have been taken from there in the first place.

Bellamy's People was created by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, elder statesmen of the comedy genre, and is a follow-up to their Radio 4 hit Down the Line. As its narrative mechanism, it has a phone-in host leaving his studio for a tour of the UK to explore the nature of the Brits. This allows for a gallery of characters to be displayed - two aged aristocratic sisters, one a Communist, the other a Nazi (shades of the Mitfords); a Muslim community leader whom no one in his community knows; an ageing rock star who thinks his younger self was a prat; two celebrity-struck, squeaking women in early middle age who form the phone-in host's fan club, and so on. Some trembled on the edge of being funny but all showed how hard it is to do caricatures well if you are not a talented mimic.

In interviews promoting Bellamy's People, Paul Whitehouse has revealed the show is largely improvised and, as a result, the filming process involved hour upon hour of talking rubbish, which had to be painstakingly sifted through in order to extract the funny bits. You can only wish they'd looked a bit harder because if what got served up as episode one is a selection of the best bits then the reject pile must be truly mind-numbing.

Bellamy's People has been talked up as a successor to The Fast Show and the theory looked promising: a spin-off from a spoof late-night Radio 4 phone-in, the cameras followed 'award winning' radio monkey Gary Bellamy escaping the darkness of his studio and hitting the road to meet the voices at the other end of the phone.

Enter Whitehouse, long-time collaborator Charlie Higson and a motley crew of comedy veterans to have a ball as a selection of crazy characters. And there was the hitch: from the Essex fat bloke trapped in his room to the batty old posh chap ('Oh, I've brought you into the wrong room') to the East End tough-nut gangster, every one of these 'characters' turned out to be constructed from cardboard cut-out clichés. Which wouldn't matter too much if they were funny but, with the exception of a gag about bedside panthers from the zoologically confused Lion of Harlesden, Early D ('they're black lions!'), it all fell horribly flat. Floating through the middle of it all was Rhys Thomas as Bellamy, whose contribution amounted to various shades of bemusement. Understandable, perhaps, but a bit of banter might have spiced things up.

Maybe it was Whitehouse and Higson taking elaborate revenge on the younger generation of comedians they feel alienated from. 'I did you, I did you right up!' was the closest we came to a catchphrase, courtesy of gor-blimey builder Martin Hole. Thomas could be forgiven for thinking the line was aimed at him.

A few years ago, Radio 4 phone-in show Down The Line caused no end of controversy as the complaints flooded in, from listeners who hadn't quite cottoned on to the fact that it was a spoof. It's taken its time getting there but the character-based comedy show has finally arrived on TV, as Bellamy's People, in which the radio host Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) tracks down some of his more eccentric listeners.

But the most notable thing about the show is the men behind it - Bellamy's People marks the first TV collaboration in ten years of The Fast Show creators Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. This time around we're promised a slightly quieter, more reflective show, and one more concerned with gentle social satire. But with a cast that also includes the likes of Simon Day and Amelia Bulmore, there should hopefully be some laughs in there as well. Let's just hope, given the combination of Paul Whitehouse and comedy characters, that the prosthetic makeup isn't as terrifying as in the Aviva ad where it looks like his face is melting.

Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson have reunited for a new comedy about life in modern Britain - and this is one TV comeback I'm delighted to see.

Self-regarding Gary Bellamy (Star Stories' Rhys Thomas) is an award-winning journalist with an award-winning radio show. Now he's been released from his cosy studio and given a TV series in which he'll travel across the country to meet his listeners and find out what makes them tick.

Although headed by stalwarts of The Fast Show, the humour is more in the vein of People Like Us, that genius series featuring the now disgraced Chris Langham. It spoofs genuine "celebrity meets the public" shows brilliantly, using ridiculous links such as: "Cirencester in Gloucestershire couldn't be more different from Harlesden".

The characters Gary meets are wonderfully eccentric, with some lovely performances by the likes of Simon Day, Lucy Montgomery and Felix Dexter. And, of course Charlie and Paul - although I can't help but watch Paul's performances and be reminded of his recent spate of insurance ads.

Characters range from a 23-stone man who lives in his bed to a deluded community leader who can't quite tell Gary what a community leader does. There's the screechy Trisha Webb, who runs Gary's 'Bellamy's Babes' fan club, and lovely old boy Humphrey Milner, a self-confessed silver surfer. But my favourites are a pair of posh old biddies, who made me laugh so suddenly and hard I almost snorted tea out of my nose.

Bellamy's People Review: Comedy For The People

Few of its characters are particularly memorable and it doesn't have the zip and zing of Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson's previous work.