Geoffrey McGivern

Back: TV preview

Back is not Peep Show: The Next Generation. But it also sort of is, inescapably.

Mitchell & Webb are 'Back' in Channel 4's new sitcom

So I'm happy to report that Back bucks Blackadder. This is a confident, charismatic opener of what promises to be a great little series. Here's to British comedy in rude health.

TV preview: Back, C4

Let's be crystal clear about this. Back is not Peep Show - What Happened Next? David Mitchell plays a feckless, inept man-child and Robert Webb plays a hopeless charmer who can't help cocking up and landing on his feet, but that's where the similarity ends. Almost.

Preview: Quacks

Victorian medical comedy Quacks begins Tuesday 15th August on BBC Two. Sophie Davies has had a sneak peak at the much anticipated new series...

With Blandings principally consisting of posh people strolling about being aristocratically bonkers, these adaptations of PG Wodehouse are like watching an episode of Downton where everyone has been on the gin all night. Which actually makes it rather more entertaining.

Helped no end by guest casting that included Mathew Baynton (The Wrong Mans) and Geoffrey McGivern (This Is Jinsy), the story of Throwing Eggs pretty much began and ended with the title. But it worked a treat.

Proving that Channel 4's "funny fortnight" doesn't just consist of two year old footage of Peter Kay, the channel have bagged acclaimed writer Arthur Mathews, a contributor to Father Ted and writing partner of the brilliant Graham Linehan for this one-off. Toast Of London charts a day in the life of Steve Toast - played by Matt Berry - a recently divorced actor who embarks on a controversial West End play. So controversial, in fact, that the producer is in imprison for racial chanting, leading Toast to rehearse the part of a corrupt gay detective in a prison meeting room - a suitably hysterical scene helped by the superb Geoffrey McGivern. Let's just hope for a series in 2013...

We really are through the looking glass here, as Toast Of London is yet another promising sitcom pilot. Co-written with Father Ted co-creator Arthur Mathews, it's a winningly silly vehicle for Matt Berry from The IT Crowd, and follows a farcical day in the life of a successful West End stage actor.

Yes, it finds the one-note Berry delivering the only performance he can - a bombastic, bawdy, swaggering ham with a voice like vintage brandy - but I can't deny that, with a busily gag-strewn script such as this, he exploits his limited strengths to the full. Not to be outdone, the whole cast - including the great Geoffrey McGivern, last seen in Dead Boss - deliver similarly broad performances, and the whole thing is so relentlessly daft it's hard to resist its rambling charms. More please, C4!

Returning to BBC3 four years after her critically-acclaimed sitcom Pulling was axed to make way for 17 more series' of Two Pints of Lager, Sharon Horgan recovers her form with Dead Boss, a satisfyingly silly prison-set sitcom co-written with comedian Holly Walsh.

Beginning with a double-bill, it stars Horgan as Helen, a woman wrongly sentenced to 12 years in the chokey for the murder of her boss. Her thwarted efforts to clear her name and survive within this madhouse form the spine of a likeable farce, which, as directed by The League of Gentlemen's Steve Bendelack, has a cartoonish quality vaguely redolent of that other (good) BBC3 sitcom, Ideal.

Merrily tweaking all the usual prison clichés, it's populated by the likes of a leering Top Dog - notorious for once paper-cutting an inmate to death with a copy of TV Quick - and Jennifer Saunders as a faux-mumsy Governess. In fact the cast is uniformly strong, with Geoffrey McGivern proving particularly amusing as Helen's hopeless lawyer.

It's no Porridge, but Dead Boss still succeeds as an enjoyable streak of assured nonsense.