Daniel Peak

I was somewhat dreading having to watch this, fearing it was going to be something akin to Life of Riley and other unfunny nonsense. But while In With the Flynns is not the funniest sitcom ever made, it does have its moments.

The first thing which strikes the viewer is the way the show is filmed. While this show was made in front of a studio audience, the filming looks much more realistic than a programme like Life of Riley or My Family. When you first see it, it doesn't feel quite right, but you soon get used to it.

As a pre-watershed TV sitcom there is very little in the way of offensive material. The closest to anything really disgusting was one of the sons in the family admitting to eating a pasty from a bin, which for me was one of the best bits, as well as admitting he got free soup from people who were serving it to the homeless.

Other decent comic moments included the eldest member of the family, Jim (Warren Clarke), going on a date with a woman he met in a car boot sale - but still making the woman pay £1.50 for a scart lead.

However, for me the best and worst moments were the flashbacks. This was an interesting comedic device, synonymous with In With the Flynns writers like Daniel Peak (who also employs similar cutaways in Mongrels). The best comic moment was a bit of slapstick involving an eyebrow piercing. The worst, however, was when the other son, who was being bullied, walked into a lamppost - which was clearly fake.

In With the Flynns isn't going to set the comic world alight, and many critics will be rallying against it, but in terms of pre-watershed sitcoms, it isn't the worst show in recent years.

A mainstream, family-based sitcom billed as "warm" and "authentic" sets all the alarm bells ringing. This new six-parter written by Daniel Peak is a kind of aspirational working-class companion to the bourgeois settings of Outnumbered and My Family, but if anything, it's even more flat-footed. It feels incredibly dated, from the staging to the characters to the jokes. Will Mellor and Niky Wardley are the parents working extra shifts to take the family on holiday; Warren Clarke is the best bit as the grouchy grandfather looking for romance.

When Puppets Play Boggle

This week's is the sixth episode of Mongrels, and keen-eyed viewers will have noticed by now that it has puppets in it.

Amanda Holden goes back to sitcoms to headline Big Top, a new BBC1 comedy set in a travelling circus. Holden plays Lizzie the Ring Mistress, which calls to mind a smutty joke the show would never contemplate tackling. No, we're in family-friendly sitcom territory for this series by writer Daniel Peak (My Hero), so it's all very innocuous and frivolous stuff that kids and the elderly will find amusement in. Predictably, it's taken a battering in the press for its old-fashioned sensibilities, but such critics forget the fact that a large portion of the British public just aren't interested in the cutting-edge comedy offered by The Thick Of It and Peep Show. A lot of people just want something colourful, inoffensive and cheeky, with signposted jokes and a few famous faces (John Thomson, Tony Robinson) thrown into the mix. It's not to my taste and I won't be watching a second more, but I've seen a lot worse, and some of the gags made me smile with a groan behind my lips. Plus, there's always the sight of Amanda Holden in hotpants if all else fails.

Big Top, a new sitcom set in a travelling circus, is one of those programmes that get you wondering about the commissioning process. You'll need something to entertain you while it's on and speculating about the way it came into being will do as well as anything, unless you've got a dog that's overdue for a combing or some socks to pair up. One assumes that the performers' names came first on the pitch document. One certainly hopes that they came first on the pitch document, since the idea that it was sold on the essential concept and a sample of the writing seems implausible, to say the least. We've thought of a vehicle for Amanda Holden, somebody said, and what's more it's a role that will make it feasible for her to wear hotpants and black stockings nearly all the time. And if you bite there's a good chance that we can bolt on John Thompson, Tony Robinson and Ruth Madoc. How's that for belt-and-braces coverage? Cold Feet, Blackadder and a dab of Hi-De-Hi! behind the ears.

"So what's the sit?" asks the commissioning editor. Down-at-heel circus, replies the pitcher, run by Lizzie, a mildly over-controlling ringmistress who's the only grown-up on payroll. There's a terrible husband-and-wife clown act, a depressive East European acrobat with a crush on Holden's character, a cynical soundman called Erasmus (Tony Robinson) and the self-seeking Welsh dame who does a performing-dog routine. Oh, and it's written by Daniel Peak, who wrote Not Going Out, so there's a bit of pedigree there. Lot of running gags, lot of slapstick, comedy of types. Think Dad's Army with red noses and spandex tights. And then, one guesses - since it's not very often these days that sitcoms get green-lit without jumping through this particular hoop - there would have been a rehearsed reading of the script, so that a collection of executives could mull over its prospects. And it's at this point that speculation hits an obstacle. How could they sit in the presence of gags this lame and character depiction this arbitrary and not say no?

It does go out at 7.30pm, so it's possible that the younger audience will be advanced as an alibi. It seems heartless to use children as a human shield in this way though, and surely they deserve better than gags about ferrets down trousers and punch lines that audibly creak as they're winched into place. "I was so worried that you'd fail us on the raw sewage round the hot-dog stand," blurted out Lizzie when the health and safety inspector gave her the all clear, a line that not even Helen Mirren could have made psychologically plausible. And without an underlying psychological plausibility (the urgent cartoon drives that you'll always find in Hi-De-Hi! and Dad's Army if you dig deep enough) it just isn't comic. That line isn't an inadvertent revelation - it's hopelessly, mechanically advertant, only there to be funny. In the end, an exchange between Plonky the clown and Erasmus offered the best verdict: "If we're so terrible why do we get a big cheer when we finish?" "I think you've answered your own question there."

Amanda Holden stars as a ringmaster in this Daniel Peak-scripted, circus-based sitcom whose impressive cast also includes John Thomson, Tony Robinson and Ruth "Hi-De-Hi!" Madoc. There are so few primetime sitcoms nowadays that the experience of watching one feels surreally olde worlde - the easily tickled audience who giggle like loons even at the straight lines, foreign accents regarded as inherently amusing and jokes about a ferret down a clown's trousers "having a ball". It's almost in Mitchell and Webb's Send for Hennimore territory - like a precise pastiche of bad British comedy.

Reports of the death of the British sitcom have been greatly exaggerated. With Last of the Summer Wine making its 31st series, My Family its 11th and even Reggie Perrin recommissioned, somebody's watching. And they're the same viewers likely to warm to this new family-friendly sitcom set in a two-bit provincial circus.

It stars Amanda Holden as ringmaster Lizzie, who struggles to control a gaggle of fading acts, including a wacky ageing performer (Hi-De-Hi!'s Ruth Madoc) and a pair of hopeless clowns (John Thomson and Sophie Thompson). The script by relative newcomer Daniel Peak features dog-napping plots and ferrets-down-trousers gags rather than the observational humour that's so hip these days, but it draws upon the rich tradition of earlier comedies - from Dad's Army to Steptoe and Son - in which the humour often came from characters who are compelled by their situation to do peculiar, funny things. Spirited performances by a decent cast go some way toward making up for the dated set-up. Baldrick himself, Blackadder's Tony Robinson, turns up as the circus's wisecracking accounts man, and Holden propels the action (she was, after all, a perky comic actress in Kiss Me Kate and The Grimleys before Britain's Got Talent and Botox took over). Launching any new sitcom is a bit of a highwire act, but audiences may roll up to this one.