James Wood

While last week's tepid opener failed to prove either way whether Ambassadors could make foreign affairs funny, it's case closed by the end of this direly unfunny middle episode.

Tonight sees British ambassadors Keith (David Mitchell) and Neil (Robert Webb) forced to babysit a visiting prince (well played by Tom Hollander), while negotiating oil-drilling rights with the premier of their fictional Tazbekistan. Hilarity does not ensue. Aimed squarely at fans of The Thick of It, Ambassadors delivers precisely none of the nuanced comedy and Kafka-esque scenarios.

Given the highbrow subject matter, there's an awful lot of physical daftness, including a tiresome skit in which Hollander's prince berates a blind person while - wait for it! - not realising he's blind. The central duo don't add much, either. It's as if writers Rupert Walters and James Wood had hoped the Peep Show boys would ad-lib all the funny bits, only to find out they couldn't be arsed. By the end of this, neither will you be.

Rev writer admits show won't return this year

James Wood says BBC2 sitcom's cast are 'too bloody successful' but hopes to make a third series in 2013.

A few weeks ago I dismissed the ecclesiastical sitcom Rev as far too understated and joke-shy for its own good. But I've since grown quite susceptible to its modest charms. I'm not religious, but I like that it avoids the cheap, obvious route of mocking Christianity. Instead it chides and celebrates the foibles of humanity, and presents us with a believable vicar, the terrific Tom Hollander's flawed yet likeable Adam Smallbone.

The final episode saw him question not his belief in God, but whether there is any point doing His work in a world full of suffering and idiocy. After making a drunken fool of himself, verbally abusing his wife and picking a fight with a gang of youths, he decided he was needed after all when called upon to deliver last rites to a dying pensioner. It's a credit to writer James Wood that he managed to juggle these tonal shifts convincingly. Beautifully performed by all, Rev is at once a thoughtful study of faith and a likeable comedy judiciously balancing pathos and humour. I kneel corrected.

Hallelujah, and praise The Lord, for a decent sitcom. I would even go so far as saying that should Rev find the audience it deserves - which is never a given - it would have the makings of a classic.

Not since Channel 4's brilliant, if shamefully underrated, Book Group has an opening episode so impressed me. James Wood's script was an object lesson in how to set up a series with the minimum of plot contrivance, clunky exposition or stereotypical characters. Moreover, it positively exuded confidence, intelligence and wit: never surrendering to the temptation of the cheap gag, but allowing its humour to build gradually and seductively. The laughs, when they came, were worth waiting for.

The excellent Tom Hollander takes the title role of the Reverend Adam Smallbone - OK, maybe the one cheap gag - newly arrived from the delights of rural Suffolk to minister to a socially and economically deprived inner-city parish. Dibley it ain't.

Episode one saw his minute congregation suddenly swollen by middle-class parents attracted by the whiff of a good Ofsted report for the local church school. With a hole in the stained glass window to repair, Smallbone's conscience is sorely tested by this new and potentially lucrative source of income.

Rev is by turns gentle and charming, acerbic and satiric. Its allotted span of one score and ten minutes flew by far too quickly, and I can't remember the last time I thought that about a new sitcom.

If I have one minor criticism, it is Smallbone's internal monologue with God. At first this struck me as just a little bit twee, but then I figured that an element of spirituality is tolerable in a comedy about a vicar, so as long as God doesn't answer back, I'm prepared to forgive it. Amen.

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

In a medium awash with lazy stereotypes, it's original thinking that stands out. The most compelling television provides a new perspective on an old story, and challenges the laziest of preconceptions with wit, humour and more than a dash of bravado.

BBC Two's new series Rev is pretty much a masterclass in how to pull this off. Take one fine actor (Tom Hollander), add an equally brilliant supporting cast (Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney, Ellen Thomas), choose a fraught subject (religion), throw in some punchy writing (James Wood) and get Peter Cattaneo (of The Full Monty fame) to direct the lot and what have you got? A damn fine reason to stay up late on Monday nights, that's what.

Firstly, the subject matter: religion, or more specifically, the Church of England. With the notable exception of Father Ted, comedies involving vicars tend to be soporifically safe. Not only is Rev travelling without seatbelts, it is also doing 90 miles an hour down country lanes with the roof off and the stereo on full blast. This is no gentle cake-and-cassock comedy; it's the story of an ordinary, fallible vicar living in a tough, brutal world who is trying to do something very extraordinary: stay true to his faith.

That the Reverend Adam Smallbone is an ordinary fellow we know from his behaviour. He is a man who jumps the lights on his bike, who gets nervous and drinks too much at parties, who tries (and fails) to have sex with his wife. His flawed but irresistibly likeable persona comes across loud and clear in just a few opening moments, brilliantly pinpointed by the direction, the writing and, of course, by Hollander himself, whose performance is outstanding.

The themes, too, are unrelentingly contemporary. Smallbone is in charge of St Saviours, a grand, dilapidated church in a run-down inner-city area of London with a confusingly mixed catchment. There are the regulars, a rag-tag collection of locals led by Colin, the neighbourhood ne'er do well, who has a fond affection for the "vicarage"; and there are the newcomers, in the shape of the arrogant, urbane middle classes, led by the local MP, played as a modern-day social Flashman by Alexander Armstrong. Simon McBurney is deliciously oily as the Archbishop, who Smallbone only ever seems to encounter in the back of a taxi, all black leather gloves and dark threats.

The opening theme is current and controversial: "On your knees, avoid the fees", chirps Armstrong's villainous MP, as he horse-trades a place for his delinquent son in exchange for cash to repair the broken stained glass window of St Saviours. It's a merciless commentary on modern life; but it also has a surprisingly strong moral, dare I say thoughtfully theological, core. The temptations that assail Smallbone may be very contemporary in their nature; but they are as eternal as the themes of the Bible itself: right v wrong, truth v corruption, the poor v the rich.

As to the comedy, it's of the organic kind, not the obvious gag kind. Outside the church, the Reverend and Colin share a bottle of beer and discuss Richard Dawkins (as you do). "If I met him I'd kick him in the bollocks," says Colin, with customary frankness. Earlier Smallbone, confronted for the nth time by a group of sneering builders and their spectacularly unfunny jokes about choir boys, pauses. Slowly, and with a look of weary resignation, he removes his dog-collar. "Why don't you just f*** off," he says. The viewer punches the air with joy.

Rev, the new comedy series starring Tom Hollander as a vicar struggling to cope in an inner-city parish in Hackney, East London is an absolute joy. The script was written by James Wood, the man responsible for the brilliant comedy Freezing, and it is directed by the Oscar-nominated Peter Cattaneo, of The Full Monty fame. Not only is it extremely funny, but like all the best comedy it is based on truthful observation - gleaned from the experiences of real Church of England priests. What makes it so unusual and warm-hearted is that Hollander's priest is so sincere. This is a priest who believes in God, who prays and can take on Richard Dawkins without a hint of sanctimony - and who still finds life a source of constant tribulation.

When Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews created Father Ted in 1995, they breathed new life into the stereotype of the comedy vicar, a character that for too long had been suffocated by the tyrannical stranglehold of Derek Nimmo. Unfortunately Richard Curtis simultaneously came up with The Vicar of Dibley, a programme as twee and mediocre as any number of Nimmo's cassock-based comedies.

Perhaps realising that the realm of the ecclesiastical sitcom hasn't been successfully exploited in a while, acclaimed comic actor Tom Hollander has co-created Rev, in which he plays a harassed vicar at a struggling inner city London church.

Sadly, despite the talent involved - the cast also includes Alexander Armstrong, Finding Eric's Steve Evets, Peep Show's Olivia Colman and comedian Miles Jupp - this low-key comedy is a disappointment. The blame must lie with writer James Wood, who also wrote the similarly underwhelming media satire Freezing, in which Hollander's ferocious comic performance was the sole highlight.

The jokes in Rev are sparse, weak and principally based around the supposedly amusing conceit of a vicar acting in ways you wouldn't expect. So, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, played with amiable anxiety by the always watchable Hollander, smokes, drinks, swears and enjoys sex with his wife.

So, I imagine, do a lot of modern priests - indeed, a group of them are credited as technical advisors - but that doesn't mean the concept is funny in itself. Father Ted admittedly employed similar material, albeit far more inventively than Wood does.

The opening episode takes underpowered swipes at middle-class pretentions and hypocrisies when Smallbone faces a moral dilemma over the sudden rise in church attendance due to a glowing Ofsted report on a local church school. But the episode just dawdles along and not even Hollander's bumbling charm can save it. Rev, like many sitcoms before, may improve as it goes on, but there's precious little here to encourage you to find out.

The secret of Freezing's initial success was probably that - like most good experiments - it wasn't doing anything radically new. Themes included the brittle nature of success, and the pointlessness of much of what gets published. Substitute television for publishing, and both these themes are ones that should be close to any new TV writer's heart.

James Wood threw scathing observations about BBC1's Holby City into Freezing; perhaps it would have been too close to home for him to berate Casualty, Holby's sister show, and one for which Wood has written in the past.

Acute observations, however, were not enough to make Freezing feel as though it would ever reach far beyond a specific audience: namely, one concerned with publishing and the media.

Writer James Wood hilariously skewers so many targets - self-obsessed luvvies, disingenuous media types, pretentious foodies, charlatan TV 'experts', to name but a few - that one fears he might never eat lunch in this town again. Indeed, I suspect some scores were being settled - to great comedic effect - by both writer and cast. And Freezing is stuffed so full of gags that you might want to record it while you're watching and replay it immediately to catch the jokes drowned out by your loud laughter. A gem.