Jack Seale

Radio Times review

Charlie Brooker's digital dystopia delivers a festive mystery in anthology form, with three connected stories about dark things in a twisted near-future. Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall lead the cast as two men sharing a Christmas meal somewhere remote and snowy. Where are they? And who are they, really? As the companions exchange stories, we see Oona Chaplin as a woman bedevilled by "smart" gadgets, and Hamm himself offering unconventional romantic advice.

Plus, in the sort of flip between virtual and tangible worlds that's the trademark of the series, the question is asked: what would happen if you could "block" people and never see or hear from them again in real life, as you can on Twitter and Facebook?

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Radio Times review

Beleaguered Ken goes away for the weekend, leaving the family to run riot and the show to soldier on without Greg Davies. It plays safe with a standard frat-house/Inbetweeners story: bluntly randy Dylan (Tyger Drew-Honey) is told by his cold, beautiful classmate Zoe (Holly Earl) that she'll take his virginity if he throws a house party while Dad's absent. The influx of hungry ravers gives mystic Dale his chance to show he can run his late father's baked potato van.

Cuckoo's telegraphed plots and wild implausibles make it an uneven watch, but the good bits are great. As the cartoonish Dale, Twilight heart-throb Taylor Lautner shows he's got fine comic timing as well as beauty, the swine.

Radio Times review

A third outing for Charlie Brooker's Naked Gun-style cop spoof, although the comparison's becoming fainter and fainter. This is the strongest instalment yet, because the show's built up its own armoury of bad puns, ridiculous direction and smashed fourth walls. It no longer needs to bother about specifically spoofing individual crime dramas, either.

The story, as if that's important, concerns a serial killer who seems to be linked to a sinister therapy spa. Adrian Dunbar plays its powerful owner, doing a particularly good maniacal laugh that goes on for much too long. Karen Gillan is a bit underused as the squad's naive new flibbertigibbet, but that's fine because regular stars John Hannah and Suranne Jones are better than ever at straight-faced, dignity-shredding baloney. Keep looking out for the signs on the wall behind them.

Radio Times review

Series two of a sitcom that was billed in 2012 as a transatlantic casting coup, but turned out to be part of a domestic comic's rise to the top. Saturday Night Live alumnus Andy Samberg jetted over to play a hippy-ish American who crash-lands into an ordinary Staffordshire family. Having been overshadowed by the man playing the head of the household - Greg Davies - Samberg has been killed off, replaced by Twilight star Taylor Lautner as a second airheaded interloper.

With Esther Smith taking over as Davies's hippy-loving daughter, and a lot of silly setting up to do, this episode feels transitional. But the show's main problem is still there: Davies is funnier than the rest of the cast. And since series one went out, Man Down has shown us that his own scripts are a lot stronger than this.

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Radio Times review

The mockumentary about the absolute idiots who run a London pirate radio station gains a harder edge this week, as we go deeper into MC Grindah's astonishingly poor parenting. It's little Angel's fifth birthday and so, while she and mum Michelle are out with the girl's suspiciously similar-looking "Uncle" Decoy, Grindah organises the party. Local entrepreneur Chabuddy G offers a shipment of his money-spinning "Polish Vodka", so called because the key ingredient is window polish: "We had a few teething problems... people losing their teeth and that."

Amid the crude but very funny gags, little Angel's party is bleak - something the show boldly doesn't play entirely for laughs.

Radio Times review

Sending the characters in your downbeat sitcom to rock bottom carries the risk that the whole show will become suffocatingly sad. We're dipping into that rut a couple of times tonight as jobless, hopeless impressionist Martin (Terry Mynott) says goodbye to his grief-stricken son and quarrels with his equally lacklustre soulmate Jean (Jo Hartley). Martin's even doing the same old Wogan and Attenborough routines over and over.

The show just about veers back from the edge. As usual Neil Maskell does the heavy lifting as Neil the paranoid newsagent, who this week fears that oestrogen in soya milk is giving him moobs. When Neil and Martin go double-dating and Martin meets a woman who enjoys celebrity voices, writer Matt Morgan indulges in a comic set piece he must have had up his sleeve from the start. It was worth waiting for.

Radio Times review

One of 2013's best debut sitcoms returns, as downbeat, sad and kind as ever. Martin (Terry Mynott), the lonely loser with a secret talent for doing impressions, lost his nerve at the end of series one when stardom beckoned. Now here he is, in his pants in the kitchen, heating up tinned food while absent-mindedly perfecting his Walter White. Unwanted help comes from Neil, the nervous newsagent who becomes Martin's new agent - "it's only one letter different!" - and insists he try busking outside Timpson's.

This isn't one of those misery-coms that doesn't have any jokes, but little disappointments drizzle down constantly onto Martin's prematurely grey head, the main source of pain being his own lack of endeavour. Classic sitcom leads are confident but delusional - Martin, played with real gentleness by Mynott, is humble and awfully self-aware. That he somehow finds things for him and us to laugh at is what makes The Mimic quietly comforting, like sugary tea on a wintry day.

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