Harry Venning

TV Review: Life Of Riley

Well, shock horror. Even allowing for the fact that my expectations could not have been any lower, Life Of Riley turned out to be surprisingly good.

Does BBC Comedy have some sort of Soviet five year plan to quintuple the production of sketch shows? Is there a sketch show arms race being fought with a rival broadcaster?

Cowards is yet another one, but I have to say that it is funny and original enough to stand out from an ever increasing crowd. The humour is a mix of the deadpan and the surreal, performed with subtlety and skill. Having said that, episode one was stolen by a long haired terrier who - assisted by subtitles - was trying to explain through barking that he was actually a man under a witch's curse.

TV Review

Based upon the bestsellers by Eoin Colfer, Half Moon Investigations is a gem of a show about a two teenagers running a detective agency in their secondary school.

After a five-year absence, Jonathan Creek returned with a two-hour special, The Grinning Man. Vanishing guests in a haunted attic was the theme, with Alan Davies joined by Sheridan Smith as his latest sleuthing sidekick.

As an audience participation puzzle it couldn't be faulted. I spent the final 30 minutes hurling increasingly desperate and ultimately incorrect speculations at the screen - It's a false knife!, It's a false corpse!, The magician is the reincarnation of his grandfather! etc - but never came close to unravelling any of the several mysteries contained in David Renwick's script.

But for all its ingenuity, Renwick's work just couldn't support its excessively indulgent running time, with the drama beginning to sag long before the murderer was revealed.

Sketch shows really are ten a penny these days, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart, but Beehive can at least boast the distinction of an all female cast. However, any initial hopes that this show may prove the successor to Smack The Pony are quickly dashed.

Beehive certainly has its moments, but not enough of them. Highlights included the demure geishas who were prone to very noisy flatulence, the playground full of George Michaels and the three musketeers whose 'all for one and one for all' philosophy extended to going out on a date. But a smile was all that these managed to raise, with the rest of the sketches leaving me cold.

I am assured by people whose judgment I trust that the episode I caught was an uncharacteristically weak one. Also, the show's quartet of performers are all funny and charismatic. So Beehive probably deserves the benefit of the doubt, and a second chance. It might be a slow developer, but I am not hopeful.

Heather Mills has not enjoyed a particularly good press of late, so Star Stories waded into the fray to redress the balance. Its unique take upon tabloid events cast Paul McCartney as a sadistic and cruel tyrant, egged on by his manipulative daughter Stella, cosily living in a luxurious country house called Mandalay. Heather, in contrast, is a shy and naive Geordie girl for whom her charity work is everything.

'Whose the daddy?' screams Paul in flashback, as he terrorises the other three Beatles into performing on the Abbey Road studio's roof. So great was the programme's excursion into delusional fantasy that it even suggested Sir Paul's hair was dyed.

Jokes about Mills' disability were inevitable but, given Star Stories' gleefully puerile approach, remarkably few and far between.

Star Stories serves up pretty much the same fare every week, irrespective of its subject matter, but sheer nerve, energy and clever writing has so far kept it from going stale.

The best sitcom currently on TV has to be Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's Outnumbered, which succeeds in being both charming and funny in equal measure.

Hugh Dennis and Clare Skinner star as the parents to three young children. That's about it, concept wise, and the plotlines are equally uncluttered. This week the family were delayed at a foreign airport and pass the time by playing games, crashing luggage trolleys, teasing police dogs, terrorising a passenger on crutches and trying to explain to a four year old child why religious fanatics might want to blow their plane up.

Apparently much of the younger cast members' dialogue is semi improvised, which accounts for the stunningly spontaneous performances and some unexpectedly bizarre lines. For the grown ups there is a terrific script to deliver, packed with intelligence, wit, subtlety and imagination. Dennis and Skinner make the most of it, and also manage to generate considerable screen chemistry that holds the whole show together.

Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe took time off from spewing cheery vitriol across the television schedules to interview writers about the craft of writing.

These were clearly writers that Brooker admired, so his interview technique was disconcertingly sympathetic. The end result was a masterclass from such luminaries as Russell T Davies, Paul Abbott, Tony Jordan and Graham Linehan. All of whom spoke wittily and winningly about the combination of prevarication, panic and perspiration that produces a television script.

Ironically, the most pertinent point of a fascinating 50 minutes was made by a writer who wasn't even present. Abbott quoted Jimmy McGovern on the ever prickly problem of presenting exposition in dialogue: 'I would rather be confused for ten minutes than bored for five seconds.'

Review in The Stage

Clone really isn't very funny at all. That it is accompanied by the uncritical and inexplicable guffaws of a canned laughter track doesn't disguise the fact that it is a veritable humour free zone, but merely draws more attention to it.

Review by The Stage

Television isn't the natural home for monologues which, by their very nature, don't offer an awful lot to look at. Strong writing and performances are essential to keep impatient fingers away from the remote control. But Mouth to Mouth was very impressive on both counts.