Darren Boyd

Trying, review

Apple TV's first British comedy isn't as funny or as quirky as it's trying to be.

The Personal History of David Copperfield review

Armando Iannucci both respects and reinvents the novel in a wonderfully entertaining adaptation full to bursting with fantastic comic performances.

David Copperfield adaptation is brilliantly inclusive

Dickens's story is very funny in The Thick Of It mastermind's hands with a bonus of wonderful casting.

Review - The Personal History of David Copperfield

It is a rollicking ride. A bit too rollicking, if I'm honest, careening through the 350,000 word novel at breakneck speed.

Smack The Pony: Amanda Holden was first choice for show

The groundbreaking female-led sketch show Smack the Pony burst onto screens exactly 20 years ago.

This hospital sitcom is half joke-fest, half soap opera, as if a team of American gag-writers had taken over Holby City. There isn't a wasted word. If you enjoy rat-a-tat one-liners, the way Friends and Roseanne were written, The Delivery Man will win you over.

The stories are set in a maternity wing where Matthew, an improbably handsome male midwife (Darren Boyd), has set all the women's hormones raging.

His boss (Fay Ripley) is throwing herself at him, his co-worker (Aisling Bea) is flirting like a stoat on heat, and even the expectant mums look ready to dump their husbands and waddle away with him.

After three episodes, we really need to know who Matthew will end up bedding. And that means we'll have to keep watching every week, because ITV weren't stupid enough to give away the whole series in advance.

If you want to binge-watch The Delivery Man, you'll have to wait till the end of the series. Or better still, treat yourself to half-an-hour each Wednesday. What's wrong with doing it the old way?

Paparazzi descend on Easthill Park hospital when Comfort Evans, ditzy star of reality TV show SHAG ("Sussex Hunks and Girlfriends"), pops in for an optimistically incognito pregnancy checkup. It doesn't take long for copper-turned-midwife Matthew (Darren Boyd) to get roped into a campaign to put the press corps off the scent. If ITV's maternity-ward sitcom can feel a little underwritten, a game cast - notably Boyd, Fay Ripley and Pompidou escapee Alex Macqueen - enhance the farce as best they can.

There's an odd mix of ingredients in this sitcom about a policeman-turned-midwife. Written by the team that made Channel 4's strange, funny Green Wing, and featuring the offbeat skills of Darren Boyd, it is very much an ITV primetime comedy. The result is some verbally dexterous stuff from Boyd, alongside Paddy McGuinness's likable gurning, and a farce-heavy plotline, in which an expectant father has trouble remembering which room he's meant to be in, while Matthew makes the error of offending nurse Lisa's boyfriend.

Radio Times review

Darren Boyd's mildly irritating male midwife Matthew is back for a second stab at this gag-heavy and rather preposterous comedy. Here he has to deal with a father who has two women in labour at the same time (likely, huh?) and a silly subplot involving an altercation with the thuggish boyfriend of the colleague he fancies. There are some decent lines but a few gas-and-air duds you wouldn't expect from Green Wing writers Robert Harley and James Henry.