Isy Suttie

The first series of Stephen K Amos's stand up/sketch comedy/chat show comes to an end. It's been something of a hit and miss first outing, with the humour erring on the side of juvenile a lot of the time. Tonight, Amos welcomes fellow comedians Isy Suttie (who plays Dobby in Peep Show, also on this evening, see below) and Marlon Davis in to do a bit of stand-up. Meanwhile he does his weekly "phone call" to his mother (played by Amos in drag), and meets stuntman Paul Hammer (again, Amos in costume) who reveals he stood in for both Muhammad Ali and Rod Hull's Emu on Michael Parkinson's chat show.

The dysfunctional flatshare sitcom, which seems to get stronger with age, settles into its seventh series. Neurotic nerd Mark (David Mitchell) tries to win back dream woman Dobby (the excellent Isy Suttie) when she starts dating a graphic designer. Meanwhile, feckless Jeremy (Robert Webb) lands a cushy job on a music website but soon makes the mistake of signing up his freaky friend Super Hans (the gloriously deadpan Matt King), whose band go under the moniker of Man Feelings.

Give it up now, everybody, for Man Feelings! Jeremy's disreputable druggy mate Super Hans (played by Whites sitcom writer Matt King) takes to the stage with his band tonight and its a gig destined to go down in musical history.

You might not have seen The Beatles at The Cavern or The Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, but now you can say you were there on the night that Man Feelings finally provided the answer to the musical question: What rhymes with The Apprentice?

Elsewhere in episode two, we find Mark pushing a pram and Jeremy playing the saxophone two activities for which they're totally, joyfully, unqualified. But weirdly, lots of other things do seem to be going rather brilliantly for Mark and Jeremy.

After making friends with last weeks boyfriend-in-a-coma, Jeremy (Robert Webb) has landed the coolest job in the world, heading up a music website, and Mark (David Mitchell) goes on a date with Dobby (Isy Suttie).

As Mark observes, things going well is very worrying because it just means they're about to screw them up. But along the way there are lots of wonderfully dumb one-liners on the subject of infant care (Can babies go by shredders?) and Mark and geeky mate Gerard getting very excited about their Stalin and FD Roosevelt action figures, which are obviously not toys.

Were not playing, Mark huffs. Were just arranging our models. With some noises.

Amazingly, Peep Show is now into its seventh series which makes it Channel 4's longest-running comedy show if you don't count Hollyoaks (who does?).

Never knew there was so much mileage in a sitcom about a feckless layabout and his uptight flatmate? Think again. Still, as they say in TV land, if it ain't broke, keep recommissioning it until it is.

Last week, Mark (David Mitchell) became a father and Jez (Robert Webb) met bookish hottie Zahra in the hospital waiting room. She was visiting her boyfriend, Ben, who was in a coma in intensive care. He awoke as Jez was moving in on Sara and now Jez has a problem.

This week he finds he also has a job - helping a grateful Ben run his web company. Meanwhile Mark learns from Gerrard that Dobby (Isy Suttie) has a new boyfriend. "He's younger, slimmer, better looking and more fashionable than us," says Gerrard. Their response? To form the Dobby Club and set out to wreck the relationship.

As usual, all the best lines go to Super Hans (Matt King) - "That's not jam, that's just total ******* marmalade," he tells Jez during band practice - and all the best gross-out moments go to Jez. Anyone fancy chilled breast milk in their tea?

"It's one step away from cannibalism," moans Mark when he finds out what he's been drinking. "It's luxury milk," Jez counters. "From a human cow".

Five episodes in and this sitcom is starting to get interesting. Roland White - no relation, presumably, to Raymond Blanc - struggles on as head chef in a country house hotel, battling his own delusions and his worryingly insane new employee. Alan Davies in the lead role is remarkably likeable, and the characters are all given room to breathe. Isy Suttie, the stand-up comic and musician best known for her role as Dobby, the object of Mark's affection in Channel 4's Peep Show, gets a good part as the impenetrably stupid waitress Kiki.

Matt King and Oli Lansley's slightly offbeat country kitchen sitcom is up there with Rev as one of the best comedy debuts of the year. Among the main cast - led by Alan Davies's chef Roland - Michelin-starred delights come from Isy Suttie's dippy waitress and Stephen Wight's turn as the menacingly ambitious (and weird) trainee chef Skoose. Tonight, Roland breaks the heart of his long-suffering sous chef Bib when he names Skoose as his sous for a TV cooking segment, and Australian comic Mark Little (AKA Joe Mangel from Neighbours) guests.

Another helping of this amiable kitchen comedy serves up subtle laughs from fairly predictable ingredients. Tonight's plot sees a visit from the health-and-safety inspector, Heather Critch (Julia Deakin), whose fearsome reputation forces Roland White (Alan Davies) to abandon his usual plan of bribery. His efforts to clean up the kitchen, however, are undermined by waitress Kiki (Isy Suttie) making a hash of her role as fire-safety officer.

The very idea of a new sitcom on BBC2 makes my heart sink a little - all that British comic talent ploughing through a script in search of a gag - but it's probably best to start with low expectations. That way, when a programme like Whites comes along, one may be pleasantly surprised.

Given that it's set in the chaotic, high-pressure world of the restaurant kitchen, Whites is a surprisingly even-tempered thing. It stars Alan Davies as a self-absorbed executive chef at a country house hotel (he looks the part; in fact he looks exactly like Marco Pierre White), Darren Boyd as his demoralised sous chef and The IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson as the catty front-of-house. There's a clumsy kitchen worker who spills things all the time, but there's also a creepy, ambitious agency cook named Skoose who adds some genuine menace. Whites occupies territory somewhere between dinnerladies and Peep Show (which I accept isn't much help to anyone trying to find it on a comedy map). Peep Show's Isy Suttie and Matt King (who co-wrote this) even turn up, as a hapless waitress and a dodgy meat supplier (he's dodgy, not the meat; not so far, anyway).

If it sounds surreal, inventive, original and hilarious then I'm over- selling it. It's gentle, subtly played, often funny and quite promising. At times it got a bit predictable, but I blame the leisurely pace, which sometimes allowed the viewer to catch up with the joke, and occasionally overtake it. In last night's episode the best laughs belonged to the minor characters, especially Isy Suttie's Kiki, who is kind, thoughtful and at least a half a bubble off plumb. "I remember my first day," she tells evil new boy Skoose. "I needed the loo but I was too scared to asked where it was, so I ended up going behind a gravestone in the chapel out back, and I thought I saw a ghost but it was just wee steam."

My main criticism of Whites is that it doesn't actually offer much new insight into the workings of a restaurant kitchen. Perhaps I've sat through too many episodes of Masterchef: the Professionals to be surprised, or even curious. Even the menu struck me as being a little tame. Comedy's one thing, but this show needs to take the cooking to the next level.

Talk about a sitcom whose time has come. Thanks to series like Hell's Kitchen, The Restaurant, Kitchen Nightmares and MasterChef, restaurant kitchens are now as familiar to us as the inside of our own fridges.

We know they're all run by shouting egomaniacs who hate vegetarians and love the sound of their own voices, so we need no further introduction to the world of Whites. Whites (as in chefs' whites, as opposed to Marco Pierre) is written by Oliver Lansley and Matt King - best known as the sublimely surreal Super Hans from Peep Show. It's based on King's own experiences working in a Michelin-starred restaurant and he also appears briefly in this episode as a delivery man. It's just a pity that he's not in it more.

It's hilariously well-observed but, because it isn't straining for belly laughs every single second, characters also have room to breathe and just be themselves.

Alan Davies is perfectly cast as head chef Roland White, (again, no relation to Marco) who is too busy to help out during service because he's dictating his memoirs. Sample, genius quote: "If God didn't want us to eat animals he wouldn't have made them out of meat."

White's put-upon sous chef Bib (Darren Boyd), who is left to soldier on alone, is initially delighted when Roland takes on an apprentice to help out. But his happiness quickly dissolves into panic when the newcomer, Skoose, turns out to be a borderline sociopath.

Also in the mix are The IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson as front of house manager Caroline, the excellent Maggie Steed as eccentric hotel owner Claudia, and Peep Show's Isy Suttie as terminally thick waitress Kiki.

Watching this, you're reminded of why good chefs bang on about only using topquality ingredients. This recipe brings out the best in all of them.

Alan Davies - he's the curly-haired Arsenal fan who used to be a stand-up - stars in this new comedy drama about once-famous chef Roland White, who long-ago lost his pizzazz and with it his Michelin stars. Now's he's struggling to keep a country-house hotel afloat in the company of his long-suffering sous chef, Bib (Darren Boyd).

Their task isn't made easier by dozy waitress Kiki (Isy Suttie), ambitious apprentice chef Skoose (Stephen Wight) and sarcastic restaurant manager Caroline (Katherine Parkinson). There's a great moment in tonight's opening episode which involves Kiki telling Skoose what happened when she was caught short and had to go to the toilet behind a gravestone in the churchyard. "I thought I saw a ghost, but it was just wee steam." She also asks Bib for an eggless omlette, and is handed an empty plate sprinkled with parsley.

The cast trained in Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant, so at least the chopping and plating-up look fairly authentic. So does the way the programme is filmed, using fast editing and handheld cameras to give a real idea of what life in a busy kitchen is actually like.

Writers Matt King and Oliver Lansley are said to have modelled the whole thing on the US hit Entourage, which isn't a bad template for a comedy drama. Looking down the cast list, it might be safer to say Peep Show is the inspiration: Suttie also plays the wonderful Dobby in the long-running Channel 4 comedy, while writer King (who also appears in Whites as wheeler-dealer Melvin) is better known as Super Hans.