Jane Horrocks

Sheridan Smith, Jane Horrocks, John Bishop and Johnny Vegas are among the stars appearing in a week-long series of short autobiographical comedies. The season opens with Barbara Windsor, who recalls an embarrassing teenage encounter with a wardrobe mistress and a subsequent trip to buy her first bra. Also tonight, Jack Whitehall's story tells of a flamboyant 10 year-old who liked to dress up.

Aardman Animations, the studio behind many of Nick Park's triumphs, conjures another stop-motion corker that fairly swarms with clever little jokes and details. Our heroes here are a group of jauntily anthropomorphic chickens; they're plotting their escape to freedom from the tyrannical Mr and Mrs Tweedy, who run the farm on which they live. The voice cast boasts Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks and Mel Gibson.

It's hard to know what to make of Trollied, the keen-to-please comedy set in a northern supermarket. It's likeable and has good performances (Jane Horrocks, Mark Addy and Jason Watkins), but it needs more definition - too often it appears like a series of mini sketches linked by the fact that they are all set in a supermarket. In this episode, the amusingly insecure Julie (Horrocks) is left in charge at Valco when Gavin (Watkins) is away on business. Andy (Addy), meanwhile, sees a fellow butcher in the shop and thinks his job is at stake.

Trollied is the first of several new comedy shows being made by Sky this season.

The show is set in a supermarket, looking at the lives of a north-western branch of Valco ("Serves you right"). The characters include Julie (Jane Horrocks), the current deputy manager who currently is holding the job temporarily, or as she puts it "interimming" (and not "into rimming"); butcher Andy (Mark Addy), a man who can tell a type of sausage by simply resting it on his shoulder; and Margaret (Rita May), a pensioner who appears to be away with the fairies.

The series began with a double bill, which probably helped as it gave viewers who weren't sure about the show the chance to see how it would develop.

Before the series began some questions had already been thrown up by the critics. For starters, how come no-one had set a sitcom in a supermarket before, as it seems an ideal location - an environment from which the staff cannot escape from, with various layers of hierarchy, including managers, checkout staff and stockers. I think I know why such a setting has never done before - cost. Supermarkets are large buildings, and normally there is no way a supermarket would let a TV crew in there for fear of disturbing the business, so you have to build a huge set.

Luckily, when it comes to creating big-scale TV shows, Sky has experience. They're responsible for bringing Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels into real-life. Compared to creating a world resting on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a giant turtle, a supermarket should be simplicity itself. Mind you, it is easy to do when your channel is owned by the world's second largest media company (after Disney), a group which owns two of the most popular animated sitcoms in the world (The Simpsons and Family Guy), some of the biggest scale dramas currently on TV at the moment (House), and owns more newspapers than you can shake a hacked telephone at.

Trollied also has other problems when it comes to critical reception. Namely, as it is a workplace sitcom it will be compared to The Office and therefore everyone will look down on it. But why stop there? It is also a retail sitcom, so you could compare it to Open All Hours or Are Your Being Served? for that matter. Just because there are similar sitcoms to it does not mean that it will be rubbish.

In terms of laughs, there were a few - enough to give it promise - but whether or not it can sustain that I don't know.

Last night's TV: Trollied/Sky1

I'm concerned about Jane Horrocks. She's being typecast, or so it seems to me. First that Tesco advert - you know the one, from the mid Nineties, the one she said paid for her home ("Tesco Towers") and stopped her having to do dross TV. That's as opposed to her new series for Sky1, Trollied, which, presumably, she doesn't think is dross TV.

There are some things you know really shouldn't make you laugh but somehow completely crack you up. So it was with an exchange on Trollied in which interim supermarket boss Julie (Jane Horrocks) informed the deli counter that she was, ahem, interimming. I'll run that past you one more time: she said she was 'interimming'. Suffice to say the butcher boys - Mark Addy and Nick Blood, having a ball - chewed that one up and spat it out for all it was worth.

Away from the unreconstituted filth, not all of Trollied hit the same spot. Horrocks was aiming for pathos as the socially inept Jane but it was a little too easy to see why everyone wanted to see the back of her. Jason Watkins, beloved of Psychoville and Being Human fans, seemed oddly muted as her boss.

It's the minor characters that make Trollied worth tailgating, with a psychotic shoplifter, a man with a habit of shooting a can of aerosol cream into his mouth by way of a perk, the pick of the bunch. More of him, and more airtime for the fledgling romance twixt butcher boy Kieran and his till-trapped admirer, and Trollied could yet beat the bargain bin.

The Office may now be a decade old, but its influence can certainly be felt on this workplace comedy that also features a hapless authority figure, apathetic employees and even some Tim-and-Dawn-style unrequited romance. The setting is Valco, a budget supermarket in the North West, where Jane Horrocks plays Jill, the interim deputy manager, who's the kind to open a conversation with "no offence" and then immediately go on to wound the feelings of her subordinates. You know the type - bristling with ambition, but unable to keep from cramming her foot into her mouth at every opportunity. As for the humour, well, it feels a little broad at this point, particularly the scenes involving Jill's attempts to ingratiate herself with her boss Gavin (Jason Watkins), which predictably end with her buried in social shame. But there's definite potential in the slippage between the store's happy-to-help façade and the general disillusionment of its staff, with Nick Blood and The Full Monty's Mark Addy proving to be particularly effective in this opening double bill as butchering duo Kieran and Andy.

You have to give sitcoms a chance, a huge chance. You have to take the amount of time you'd give, say, a prospective brother-in-law, and multiply that by the number of characters there are. Because eventually, once you've got to know them, you're going to find them a lot funnier.

This is the theory. I've heard it expounded a lot - although, admittedly, mainly by one person who works in TV. But trying not to fall into the trap of hating everything immediately, there are bits of Trollied (Sky 1) that are a little lazy; the plotting is a bit half-cocked. Jane Horrocks's interim manager is about to have a party, and she gets blown out by everybody, including her sister; she immediately swallows her pride and asks the guys on the butchery counter, and they immediately say no.

Computer programmers talk about the "five whys": so that if you ask "why" once, then you might partly mend a bug in a program, but if you ask it five times, then you'll probably design something quite good. It's a bit random, but try deploying it in a script meeting. Why do all her guests blow her out? Why is she so desperate to have the party in the first place? Why would she invite two people who manifestly dislike her, when she has a whole supermarket full of underlings? Why, when she's apparently quite a flexible person who finds it easy to put her vanity aside, doesn't she have more friends? Why did they cast Horrocks in the first place? Is it just because every time they thought "supermarket", they got a visual picture of her wrinkling her pretty nose and arguing with Prunella Scales?

I strongly suspect that the answer to all these questions is "We don't know" and that, furthermore, if this was a computer program, it would work for about five minutes, and then it would wipe your hard drive.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at its puerile humour, sometimes out loud. Two check-out ladies, discussing Woody Allen, agree that running off with your stepdaughter is creepy, then one of them throws in: "I gave my cousin a handjob once, in a caravan." OK, it's not Oscar Wilde. And nor is the extremely extended wordplay between two homophonous phrases, one of which is qwite wude. (Horrocks is the interim deputy manager, and says "while I'm interimming . . .", whereupon the butchers go "loads of people are into rimming" and she says, "you need to face up to the fact that I'm the only one who's interimming", and they fall about. And so did I. I'm not proud of it). Nevertheless, I'm afraid it didn't really grow on me for its second episode, and its obvious antecedents - it's trying so hard to be The Office that it has Ricky Gervais's face tattooed, metaphorically, across its own - grated a bit. The Dawn-and-Tim-alike romance is particularly plain, and I don't think it really benefits from the unavoidable comparison. Though you never know, watch it a bit longer, you may come to love them.

Trollied, Sky1, review

Jane Horrocks did those Tesco ads for so long, it came as a bit of a surprise to see her in an actual programme last night. But plus ça change: despite Horrocks having an acting CV that stretches from Life Is Sweet to Little Voice via Absolutely Fabulous, Trollied was set in a supermarket not a million miles from your average Tesco.