David Elms

Cast confirmed for Mr Swallow's Christmas Carol-ish show

The full cast for A Christmas Carol-ish as critically acclaimed actress Sarah Hadland joins Mr Swallow (writer/star and double Emmy award nominee Nick Mohammed) and co.

Borderline and the art of flailing in the void

The cast of Borderline all seem to be overflowing with talent. I'm surprised the genuine in-the-moment brilliance of these actors hasn't received more attention.

Regular preview

It's a lovely little piece that doesn't necessarily go in the direction you expect.

Live Review: Ricky Whittington & His Cat

The result is a clever up-to-the-minute adult version of a traditional theatrical form with lots of good knowing lines, good subversive humour and good catchy tunes.

Capital panto: Ricky Whittington surveys modern London

A crack cast of millennial comics deliver social satire amid the poo jokes and spoof songs in an alt-panto created by Liam Williams and Daran Johnson.

Ricky Whittington & His Cat review

Ricky Whittington is a modern-day panto that's got everything, not least a sense of raucous fun with intelligent lines mixed with the nonsense, a social astuteness to underpin the big-and-daft comedy, and a tightly directed cast of talented people.

In its almost twenty years on air, Channel Five have produced very few sitcoms with the only ones I can remember being co-productions with other networks. Written and created by Chris Gau and Michael Orton-Toliver, Borderline is a mockumentary set around the border control of a fictional Northend Airport. Of all of the comedy formats I feel that the mockumentary must be one of the easiest to produce as the characters can spout of expositional dialogue without it feeling out of place. Borderline also does feel like the sort of show that you would see on Channel Five ordinarily with it smacking of the likes of Holiday Airport UK and UK Border Force. The characters that Gau and Orton-Toliver have created are also believable enough and resemble those sort of people you'd see on a low-rent documentary. So for example you have the pencil-pushing boss Proctor (Jackie Clune) who in the opening episode is keen on enforcing the latest mandate from the Home Office. There's also Clive (David Elms) who is perfectly suited to the job and Grant Brodie (Jamie Michie) who is known for detaining a lot of passengers purely based on their ethnicity. Just like any workplace comedy, Borderline has a couple of characters who don't want to be there with Tariq (David Avery) having aspirations to be a DJ and Andy (Liz Kingsman) wanting to be anywhere other than the airport. While I thought that the characterisation of the central five figures was strong, Borderline lacked anything in the way of amusing material that felt original. Anything that was done during Borderline had been done better elsewhere in the likes of The Office, W1A and the incredibly underrated People Like Us. In fact Borderline feels rather old-fashioned when you consider the fly-on-the-wall documentaries that the show spoofs aren't as prominent as they were at the turn of the century. Of the cast I enjoyed the performances given by Clune and Elms both of whom inhabited their characters well and tried their best with the weak material. Whilst I do applaud Channel Five for having a go at producing a sitcom I didn't find anything particularly memorable about Borderline. The most damning thing I can say about the show is that I didn't laugh once and that's not good for the first episode of a sitcom which is meant to make you want to stick around for the rest of the series.

TV review: Borderline, 5

There is very little that is original about Borderline, written by Chris Gau and Mike Orton-Toliver and partly improvised by the cast, but the good news is that there are some nice performances and decent slow-burn gags.