Freddy Syborn

Review: Bounty Hunters, Sky 1

The Jack Whitehall quest for global domination continues with his new comedy-thriller in which he plays bookish boffin Barnaby who unwittingly gets sucked into the violent criminal underworld.

Bounty Hunters review

Some of the issues are surely down to the establishing work the first episode has to do. So it's a good sign that after it airs you'll want to see what happens in part two. On that score, at least, job done.

Jack Whitehall & Freddy Syborn on their friendship

It started with a fight at school, but the 26-year-old comedian and 27-year-old writer are now best friends who also work together. "It's a bit like a marriage," says Jack.

Finally we come to ITV2's new post-apocalyptic sitcom Cockroaches written by Freddy Syborn who wrote alongside Jack Whitehall on Bad Education. Although Whitehall does appear in Cockroaches his is a supporting role as Cuckoo's Esther Smith and Hunderby's Daniel Lawrence Taylor take the lead.

Smith and Taylor play Tom and Suze, school friends who hook up just before a nuclear attack wipes out most of the British population. Ten years later, they find themselves walking an arid wasteland alongside their daughter, and product of their hook-up; Laura. The main body of action takes place when the reluctant couple happen upon a camp run by Suze's ex-boyfriend (Whitehall). There's an obvious jealousy between cool and cocky Oscar and the slightly geeky Tom which is magnified when the former sleeps with Suze. Although she later realises her mistake, the whole situation escalates to a final scene involving a Wicker Man and a severed finger.

Syborn has certainly created a unique sitcom in Cockroaches although not all of his ideas are great. My main bugbear in this first episode was the character of Oscar as it appears that Syborn has let Whitehall play the character as broadly as possible.

Luckily both the leads are likeable and Syborn has created two protagonists that I cared about as the episode progressed.

The laugh-out-loud lines were few and far between but I preferred the quieter moments where Suze and Tom tried to decide whether their relationship was based on love or simply convenience.

Despite not being as impressive a showing as it could've been, Cockroaches definitely showed promise due to its unique premise and likeable leads. By the end of episode one I feel that the sitcom had more than found its feet and I look forward to seeing what will happen to our central couple now that Tom is in charge of a rather haphazard post-apocalyptic community.

Why post-apocalyptic Britain isn't the end of the world

Fleeces, So Solid Crew and third nipples - Freddy Syborn, writer of ITV2's new black comedy, explains why armageddon doesn't have to be doom and gloom.

Radio Times review

The complete nuclear destruction of society might not seem like the obvious basis for a sitcom, but that's how this new ITV2 series kicks off. Youngsters Tom and Suze are brought together romantically by their assumed imminent death, only to get stuck with each other after the bomb drops.

Despite the slightly tasteless premise Cockroaches is actually pretty funny, with a vein of dark comedy well mined from the tropes of post-apocalyptic films combined with a very British rationalisation of events. Also, watch out for a fun role from Jack Whitehall (who co-wrote Bad Education with Cockroaches writer Freddy Syborn) - he pops up as Suze's street-talking ex, Oscar.

There are still ideas that don't really have legs, and still they are finding their way past the green light. Take Cockroaches, a new offering from ITV2. The idea of Freddy Syborn's script is that a nuclear holocaust has wiped out most of humanity, leaving teen couple Tom and Suze (Daniel Lawrence Taylor and Esther Smith) to roam the rural wastelands with their small child, conceived in haste on the night the bomb changed everything.

Essentially, it's the classic Seventies drama Survivors with jokes. That's the theory anyway, but alas the laughs are few and far between. The first few minutes, before disaster strikes, promised much. A newscaster warned of impending Armageddon, adding that no one had bothered to tell Africa and South America. The British Prime Minister (Robert Bathurst, not his first time as a comic PM: see also Hislop and Newman's comedy My Dad's the Prime Minister) was happier answering questions in Latin, a bit like You Know Who.

Spool forward a decade, and the future looked very like the past: jokes about not getting any sex, about in-laws, about cultural reference points (Suze reminisced about a blessed yesteryear in which "we had music, we had literature, we had Ant and Dec"). Suze supplied precious breast milk to both father and daughter, a joke much more creepily explored in Little Britain. The cast enlarged when they encountered a tribe of wood-dwelling dropouts led by Oscar (the ubiquitous Jack Whitehall), a Jafaican-spouting trustafarian ("Who talks like that?" wondered Tom). By the end of the first episode, attempting to enact the climactic immolation from The Wicker Man, he had been defeated. Tom accidentally hacked off his wanking finger.

What makes men laugh?

Any comedian or pub wit knows that laughter has a sting in its tail. Willing fall-guy Freddy Syborn explains all.