Darren Strange

Sky 1's comedy firmly plants a flag on Modern Family territory with its crowd-pleasing farcical mix of hip oldsters, dippy parents and cool kids.

It most emphatically isn't Modern Family, of course; it's more like a lighter version of BBC1's My Family with its infantile mum and dad: Jenny (Sally Phillips) who loses her job and Nick (Darren Strange), the latest in a long line of hapless sitcom dads, a deluded pin brain with lame ideas about being an "entrepreneur".

As the family finances suffer and their house is repossessed, they have to move in with granny and grandad (Susie Blake and Tom Conti). The comedy catch is that the grandparents really don't want them and treat everyone, adults included, like kids. Just in case there's anything here you don't get, the whole premise is helpfully set out in the animated opening titles.

When Jenny Pope (Sally Phillips) loses her job due to a violent outburst against a colleague, her self-styled entrepreneur (read 'jobless') husband Nick (Darren Strange) and their children Becky and Sam are forced to move in with Jenny's parents. With three generations thrown together, there's a hint of Modern Family about Parents, not least in Nick's Phil Dunphy-esque role: Nick's desire to sway Jenny's father Len (Tom Conti), who thinks Nick needs to get a job, is very reminiscent of Phil's failed attempts to impress Jay. But although there are some amusing moments, Parents is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, with the possible exception of Jenny's rendition of the company mission statement to the Dad's Army theme tune. Ground-breaking it certainly is not, but it does have its moments.

If the opening episode of Lloyd Woolf and Joe Tucker's family comedy doesn't exactly sparkle, it shows some promise and boasts a good cast. When Jenny Pope (Sally Phillips) is fired from her high-profile job for fighting with a colleague, the family home is repossessed, so Jenny, husband Nick (Darren Strange) and their two children have to move in with her parents, Len (Tom Conti) and Alma (Susie Blake) in Kettering. However, it seems that Len and Alma, although accommodating, are not so willing to give up their daily routine.