Holly Walsh

I'll reserve judgement on Dead Boss, Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh's comedy about a woman wrongly convicted of murder. First episodes are often awkward affairs, and this one didn't break the rule. But I liked the dodgy solicitor who offered a "no win, some fee" service and there was a nice moment when Horgan's character found her cocky insults about a prison tough and her cronies being repeated to them by a guilelessly supportive cell-mate. "I have been completely taken out of context," she stammers, raising the question of exactly what context would take the sting out of "mentally stunted trolls". Give it time.

Dead Boss creators 'begged' Jennifer Saunders for role

Dead Boss creators Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh have admitted that they became "obsessed" with Jennifer Saunders after she agreed to appear in their new BBC Three comedy.

Dead Boss is a dead brilliant new sitcom

It apparently took Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh several years to bring Dead Boss to screen and it seems it was certainly worth the wait as all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode. But the fun didn't stop there... oh no...

'Dead Boss' like 'Mean Girls', say writers

Dead Boss writers Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh have claimed that their new BBC Three show is more like Mean Girls than a "social commentary" on life in jail.

A strong cast doesn't conceal the fact that, on the evidence of the opening two episodes, this new comedy scripted by Holly Walsh and the usually reliable Sharon Horgan (above) needs to be funnier and darker. Horgan plays Helen, wrongly sent to prison for killing her boss. Nobody on the outside, including her hopeless lawyer (Geoff McGivern), seems able to help, while inside she has to contend with the malevolent governor (Jennifer Saunders). Future episodes promise star appearances by Caroline Quentin and Miranda Richardson.

Sharon Horgan co-writes (with Holly Walsh) and stars in a new comedy about a woman wrongly imprisoned for her boss's murder. It also stars Jennifer Saunders as the prison governor and Geoff McGivern as her shady solicitor. The first of two episodes tonight sees Helen (Horgan) sent down for 12 years after the boss of the tile warehouse she works at is found dead. In the second, she enters the prison quiz, in an attempt to shave five years off her sentence.

Sharon Horgan interview

Thursday sees the return of Sharon Horgan to BBC3. Fans of laugh-out-loud comedies will remember Horgan's last BBC3 comedy Pulling with great fondness, and now she is back with a brand new six-part comedy co-written with stand-up Holly Walsh, entitled Dead Boss.

Holly Walsh interview

Holly Walsh talks about her new sitcom starring Jennifer Saunders, Sharon Horgan's amazing garden shed and how she turned a nasty accident to her advantage.

The disappointment of the week had to be Dead Boss, BBC3's six-part comedy thriller with murder-mystery overtones starring Sharon Horgan, who co-wrote the show with Holly Walsh.

Horgan plays Helen, wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment within the forbidding walls of Broadmarsh Prison. And broad is the operative word here. The producers have clearly gone for big laughs - a laudable ambition - but the route they've taken is obvious and predictable. The quality of the jokes is erratic, to say the least, while the talented cast wastes its energies on stale stereotypes.

Horgan, the most deliciously subtle of performers, is left frantically mugging away for laughs, which is something of a crime in itself.

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.