Hugh Dennis

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.

There's good news for fans of Outnumbered. The unconventional family sitcom - which uses some improvisation - will be returning for a second series on BBC One at the end of September.

Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner work well together as the hard-pressed parents of three small children. The kids themselves - Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey), Ben (Daniel Roche) and Karen (Ramona Marquez) - are terrific.

Written by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton (who created Drop the Dead Donkey), the improvisational sections work surprisingly well, especially the off-the-cuff lines delivered by the kids. The lines are so good that at times Dennis and Skinner have to suppress their own wry smiles. In addition, Dennis is a gifted comedian who can also improvise, so it's a winning combination all-round.

The series became quite essential viewing last September, despite the BBC's bizarre idea of stripping it in two bunches of three consecutive episodes across a fortnight. This sort of show works much better with a more conventional regular weekly spot. Let's hope the BBC gets the scheduling right for the new series.

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.

Delighted to say that Mock the Week is back on Thursday!

For newcomers - it's a sort of Have I Got News For You mixed with Whose Line Is It Anyway?, recorded in front of a studio audience the same day, and features the crushingly funny Frankie Boyle and Andy Parsons along with various others, including regular captain Hugh Dennis.