Hugh Dennis

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.

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis may be names that TV viewers vaguely remember from The Jasper Carrot Show, but radio fans know just how good they are at dissecting the news with clinical precision. If BBC 1's Have I Got News For You is a blunt instrument, then Radio 4's The Now Show is the delicate scalpel of a heart transplant.

The format is pretty steady, with Punt and Dennis opening and closing the show, firing at a bucket load of targets and dropping in a number of running jokes for the dedicated listener (keep your ears open for a Donald Pleasance Great Escape 'I can see perfectly'). Alongside them are comedians Jon Holmes and Marcus Bridgestock, the former answering readers 'letters and emails,' while Bridgestock has a polemic that makes him the closest the UK has to Ketih Olberman. And then there's Mitch Benn, the comedy collossus with a guitar, putting the week's highlights to music.

Welcome back, my friends, to the sequence of news-based satire programmes that seemingly never ends. After six weeks of The News Quiz, we now have six of The Now Show, which will doubtless give way to Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive and thence to The News Quiz again in the spring. Perhaps Radio 4 thinks that life is hard enough at the moment without shocking us with the new at the end of a hard week. And, to be fair, the last series of The Now Show was something of a comeback to form, with the credit crunch, the re-emergence of Peter Mandelson and the sheer otherworldliness of Sarah Palin providing plenty of grist to the mill for Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Marcus Brigstocke, Jon Holmes, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn.

Perhaps the best show on the box at the moment, and if you're not watching, then shame on you! Outnumbered is sublime and familiar and laugh out loud funny as Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis attempt to keep their boisterous brood under control. Hugh Dennis is just brilliant, which is a surprise as he's probably best known to a wider audience (outside Radio 4) as a low rent secondary character in My Hero (shudder).

Precocious children are generally funny for about five minutes or so and then you just want them to shut up and go away. So in that sense, child-centric sitcom Outnumbered was a fair reflection on its chosen subject. It was a perfect illustration of the nightmare caused by muddle-headed middle-class parents attempting rational debate with scheming brats.

But as Mum and Dad (sharp performances from Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) allowed their trio of objectionable offspring to run rings round them without any payback, the effect was aggravating. Crazy child Ben's funny opening about whether it's ever OK to hit anyone first ultimately backfired - by the end, pretty much everyone on Outnumbered, parents and children, could have done with a slap.

An odd piece of scheduling for a brilliant comedy. I hope this doesn't turn into another Trevor's World of Sport for co-writer Andy Hamilton, because the second series of this insidiously clever piece of work deserves an audience. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner return as parents Pete and Sue, constantly trying (and generally failing) to corral their brood of three boisterous children. The beauty is in the fact the kids are rarely working from a script, with a lot of the comedy coming from just letting the child actors get on with it and see what happens. Cracking!

Hugh Dennis Interview

Hugh Dennis answered some Q&A questions in the build up to the second series.

Once the middle classes were obsessed with cars, cats or gardens. These days, it's kids. Car seats? Baby on Board? Is this the nation that produced Stirling Moss?

I expected to hate Outnumbered, but was pleasantly surprised. This family sitcom is deliberately underdone with mundane settings and a loose improvisational style. And the humour is mild and wry rather than savage or out there.

Admittedly, it'd happily watch even Big Brother if Claire Skinner were involved. But Hugh Dennis is nicely lugubrious and the writing (Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton's first collaboration since Drop The Dead Donkey) is typically skilled.

Even the fact that one of the child actors is called Tyger Drew-Honey didn't put me off. Not much, anyway.

Depending how cynical you are, now is either the perfect time for political satire or a deliciously dangerous one. This topical sitcom by Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis is about a backbench MP (played by James Fleet) who's utterly at a loss in the backstage machinations of Westminster and now finds himself challenged in his constituency by a rising female Tory star.

This deliriously enjoyable family sitcom had the funniest scenes ever between grown-ups and small children. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner shone as the careworn parents but it was the child actors who were a revelation.