David Rawle

The pigeon-holers have really had their work cut out for them with Chris O'Dowd's acting career.

Its varied highlights so far have included roles as Roy in The IT Crowd, a frustrated Victorian writer in The Crimson Petal And The White[/u] and, most recently, Hollywood heart-throb status in ­[i]Bridesmaids.

Now he's going back to his home town of Boyle, County Roscommon, to play the ­imaginary friend of 12-year-old Martin Moone (David Rawle). Co-written by O'Dowd, if Moone Boy's nostalgic ­innocence reminds you of anything, it's likely to be Kathy Burke's Walking And Talking which also started life as one of Sky's Little Crackers series a couple of Christmases ago.

Launched with a two-parter, episode one is utterly stolen by Simon Delaney, who plays the father of two very nasty school bullies, while episode two follows Martin's mum's campaign to get Mary Robinson elected as Ireland's first female president.

But it also features an ­unforgettably skin-crawling cameo from Steve Coogan as fishmonger ­"Touchy" Feeley.

And we love the show's theme tune from Irish punk band, The Sultans Of Ping FC.

As befits his imaginary friend status, O'Dowd takes a bit of a back seat in terms of screen time, but it seems he's got another hit on his hands.

Last year Chris O'Dowd became Hollywood's unlikeliest heart-throb after a star turn in the comedy Bridesmaids. Since then he's been rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood, and could be forgiven for glossing over his unglamorous beginnings. Instead he's co-written a comedy about them.

Delightfully old-fashioned without tipping over into nostalgia, and full of madcap characters, Moone Boy is based on the actor's childhood in a sleepy Irish town in County Roscommon. O'Dowd, whose former claim to fame was cult sitcom The IT Crowd, plays the imaginary friend of 12-year-old Martin Moone (the adorable David Rawle). Egged on by the questionable advice of his invisible pal, poor Martin spends his days devising ingenious but ill-fated plans to thwart the school bullies and his three moody teenage sisters.

Look out for a cameo from Steve Coogan as a fabulously sleazy philanthropist in the second episode of this double bill.

Moone Boy, the new comedy from Chris O'Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy, is the former's skewed attempt to recapture the sort of grown-up family comedies of his own childhood, such as Roseanne and Cheers. It shares their canny grasp of the fresh and the old-fashioned: sweet without being saccharine, and favouring a gentle ribbing over the mean-spirited jibe. It depicts the late-'80s childhood of young Martin (charming newcomer David Rawle) in a small rural Irish town, negotiating a chaotic family life, the bad advice of his imaginary friend (O'Dowd), and a school peopled by annoying newbies, mysterious girls and bullies dishing out 'Cambodian burns'. It's an absolute charmer, and episode two follows at 10pm.

Another full-series offshoot for one of Sky's Little Crackers, Moone Boy riffs on the childhood of IT Crowd and Bridesmaids star Chris O'Dowd. Newcomer David Rawle stars as the adorably hapless Martin Moone who, when not trying to give mouth-to-mouth to dead chaffinches, is trying to protect himself from the school bullies by setting his sister up with a bullier of bullies, with shambling assistance from O'Dowd's imaginary manchild friend. A touch too twee for its own good, it's destined to be pigeonholed as the latest of Sky's ever-rolling conveyor-belt of gentle comedies, though in fairness the writing feels far sharper than Mount Pleasant.

Following on from the success of the comedy short Chris O'Dowd wrote for Sky1's Little Crackers strand, the actor has now turned that re-imagining of his childhood into a charming, if limited, six-part series. Co-written with Nick Vincent Murphy and set in O'Dowd's home town of Boyle in the west of Ireland, the stories centre on fresh-faced Martin (David Rawle) as he tries to negotiate life with his three disinterested older sisters, distracted parents and two school bullies - but at least he has an imaginary friend, Sean (O'Dowd), a grown man with a beard, for company.