Jack Doolan

Sitcom pilot Kabadasses is not only the last Comedy Lab episode for this series, but also the last ever. It's to be replaced by a new strand called E4 Funnies, which will be shorter but the pilots will have bigger budgets.

So, was Kabadasses a glorious swansong or a damp squib to end this run? Well, it definitely started somewhat slow. There seemed little in the way of plot and the deliberately bad graphics were a bit cheesy for my liking. However, as it progressed the actual ideas began to emerge, and they themselves were rather clever.

In the pilot, two friends, Bobby (Shazad Latif) and Vin (Jack Doolan) decide to create the world's first all-white kabaddi team. This, at first, sounds rather dodgy. For starters, Bobby is Asian, although he claims to be "white inside". However, the main problem when you first hear this idea is that you tend to think: "An all white team? Isn't that rather... racist?"

The answer to that question is: "No". Because kabaddi is an Indian sport - dominated by Indians - white people are, in this case, the minority. It's a political correctness story turned on its head as far as we Brits are concerned.

The pilot, however, was open-ended, with several story lines left unfinished (we didn't even see the newly formed team play a single game of kabaddi) so the show's writers are clearly hoping that it'll get a full series.

Ian Wolf, Giggle Beats, 21st November 2011

The third pilot in the Comedy Showcase series, The Fun Police is a studio based sitcom (featuring live laughter, to the shock and mortification of professional TV critics) about an inept health and safety department.

It's a more traditional sitcom in the style of shows like The IT Crowd, albeit with more unusually daft humour. The pilot sees Leslie (Rhys Derby) taking over as head of health and safety in the town of Brightsea after one of his work colleges, Neil (Jack Doolan), put their boss in a coma after accidentally falling on top of her.

The best way to describe The Fun Police is that it's 'enjoyably silly'. Leslie, for example, instead of coming up with a press statement about the accident spends his time ordering new furniture and designing a new mascot to make health and safety more fun. Another character, Toni (Katy Wix - who seems to be in at least one Channel 4 pilot per week at the moment) is an over-zealous officer with a robotic hand, paranoid about the dangers of the sea and helium balloons. This pilot also featured a cameo from Vic Reeves (credited under his real name Jim Moir) as an egotistical town planner driven mad by the power to name streets.

The Fun Police is full of ideas and is certainly a fun show. Not every joke is a cracker, but it certainly made me laugh and I for one would think it would make a good series if given the chance.

Ian Wolf, Giggle Beats, 19th September 2011

Silliness abounds in writer Matt Morgan and director Richard Boden's pilot set in the offices of an accident-prone health and safety team. Rhys Darby, familiar as the dense manager Murray in Flight of the Conchords, hams it up to the max as the still more OTT office manager, Leslie. Katy Wix and Jack Doolan are good in support. It's hard to see where it can go in sitcom terms as there's barely enough material to fill this 30 minutes, but fans of knockabout comedy may find more to please.

Gerald O'Donovan, The Telegraph, 15th September 2011