Jack Dee

Creating a "comedy cabinet"

Ukraine has a comedian as their premier, so let's mix things up a bit at No10. "Jo Brand for Prime Minister!"

Jack Dee sells out Much Wenlock

Everyone's favourite grumpster, Jack Dee, is working up material for a new UK tour. He will be testing it out on an audience at The Edge Arts Centre in Much Wenlock on March 21. And bosses at the venue say it is already a sell-out show, with all tickets being snapped up within 10 minutes of going on sale.

This sitcom, written by Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair, inexplicably limped to a second series. The set-up is that a couple (Dee and Kerry Godliman) have moved from the city to the country, where they find, among many other clichés trotted out in the various scenarios they face, that the grass isn't always greener. Joining the bad internet connection, weird neighbours and rude locals storylines of the first series were a leaking roof and moth infestation in the second. The lack of any discernible chemistry between the leads didn't help either, and Dee's lugubrious style meant Godliman had little to play off, so she upped her performance, but not in a good way. It's a shame, but it shows that sitcom (with two very good stand-ups as leads) can be less than the sum of its parts.

It is strange now to think that there was once something bracing about Jack Dee's brand of deadpan humour. The second series of this overly safe sitcom concludes with Dee's curmudgeonly city mouse being handed a key role at the village's annual festival, an honour that brings him face to face with the dreaded Lantern Man.

The caustic rural sitcom grumbles on with hapless urbanites Nicky (Kerry Godliman) and Steve (Jack Dee) still trapped in a clapped-out country cottage. With the septic tank in pungent revolt, a new web-design contract seems to offer a financial lifeline, so long as they can hoodwink the glitzy client.

Despite some middling reviews, the first series of the Jack Dee-fronted comedy about a couple swapping the city for the countryside garnered decent ratings. It returns for a second run, with Steve (Dee) and Nicky (Kerry Godliman) still having problems with their wreck of a home - not least the hole in the ceiling.

Bad Move: a confusing waste of Jack Dee's talents

The problem - OK, one of the problems - with Bad Move (ITV), Dee's sitcom with Pete Sinclair, which began a second series last night, is that Dee's character Steve is not made unhappy enough.

Review: Bad Move

Jack Dee's Bad Move is a tired and unimaginative sitcom about life in the countryside.

Jack Dee interview

'I once bought a house in the country, did it up, then didn't want to live there!'.