Chris Niel

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.

Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent, 16th February 2009

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.

David Stephenson and Neil Hughes, Sunday Express, 15th February 2009

There's little funnier than other people's emotional damage and the consequent mess they make of things, so Chris Niel's tale of two colleagues - he an estranged dad, she lately availed of a dead fiance - who have casual sex and have to deal with the aftermath is very funny indeed. Sharon Horgan (Pulling and Angelo's) and Green Wing's Stephen Mangan star as the pair, with Anthony Head their coke-snorting, sex-crazed boss ("You've been bashing some gash, haven't you?"). Who knew Rupert Giles from Buffy could be so foul-mouthed? To think he kissed Joyce Summers with that mouth.

Gareth McLean, The Guardian, 9th November 2007