Jack Dee

TV review: Josh, Series 3, Episode 2, BBC3/BBC1

I wish somebody would explain the logic of how the BBC schedules programmes. Why, for example, is the whole of Upstart Crow available online from the moment the series starts on BBC2, whereas Josh, which is an online BBC3 series is being drip-fed to fans week-by-week as if, well, as if it was a real TV programme. Yes, I know it is a real TV programme, but you know what I mean. And just to muddy things further it also airs on BBC1 - it just feels like fuzzy logic to me. If anything is going to be released boxed set-stylee it should be an online show surely...

Review: Josh, BBC3

It's one of those quirks of scheduling that the new series of flatshare comedy Josh has dropped on the same day that the new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm started on Sky Atlantic. There's definitely a touch of the Curbs in the way that Josh is plotted and also in the way that whatever can go wrong in the main characters' lives will go wrong.

I wonder what led two rather fine R4 hosts, Jack Dee and Miles Jupp, who steer I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and The News Quiz with panache and, I had thought, a true compass for comedy, to the sub-funny Bad Move? Naked pocket-stuffing greed perhaps? Dee, who co-wrote the thing, downsizes to the country and finds, rather than a rural idyll, recalcitrant locals and dodgy broadband, ho ho. Compared to Rob Beckett's Static last week it's pant-wettingly hilarious. Yet so, comparatively, are rectal polyps.

Bad Move review

At the moment it looks as if the script has sent away its knives for sharpening and not got them back yet. But Dee's miserablism is a gift that keeps on giving.

Bad Move (ITV) refers to Steve's (Jack Dee) and Nicky's (Kerry Godliman) move from the city to the country. But it might also mean the move of Dee and Pete Sinclair, who you'll remember also co-wrote Lead Balloon, from BBC2 to ITV. Or perhaps even to them doing this at all.

There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just a safe, predictable sitcom that could have gone out in 1987. Except that most of the gags in this opener are about not being able to get broadband, because they're in a dip. Meh.

Jack Dee returns to sitcom as half of an urban couple who rashly relocate to the country. Dee plays a web designer, tricky because the new house is "in a dip" and can't seem to connect to broadband; his wife (Kerry Godliman) is a gardener who must learn to charm the uniformly irritating villagers. Like Dee's BBC vehicle Lead Balloon, it relies on intricate plotting and heavily so in an opener that, in an effort to appeal to a wider audience, keeps its gags safe and gentle.

Bad Move: preview

Bad Move is definitely not The Good Life, since Steve and Nicky can't do anything for themselves (and don't want to grow any veg). But it feels even safer than the 1970s sitcom: a couple of enjoyably wry lines and photogenic scenery barely enough to warrant a return visit.

Jack Dee on Bad Move & why Brits are losing their irony

He's the comedian who could moan for Britain - but what makes Jack Dee happy?

Bad Move showed every sign of having all-too-apt title

Based on this first episode alone, it was hard not to worry that for Dee, Bad Move was showing every sign of having an all-too-apt title.

Bad Move, ITV, review

'Jack Dee sticks in sharp knives beneath the cosy haze'.