Jane Horrocks

It's The Office meets ASDA and it stars Jane Horrocks - as acting deputy manager Julie at Valco, a northern supermarket.

The art department has done a cracking job too - it looks absolutely bang-on, even though thanks to the magic of television, it was all filmed in a Bristol studio - in other words nowhere near "the north".

Plus it's full of left-over folk from Corrie - like Rita May who plays the very lovely and slightly dotty Margaret, who's got her very first job thanks to Valco's policy of employing older members of staff.

Mark Addy's in it too, behind the butcher counter and there's a nice Tim 'n' Dawn style romance between check-out girl Katie (Chanel Cresswell) and butcher's assistant Kieran (Nick Blood).

The second episode tonight is better than the first one, as the real assistant manager (another ex-Corrie star Rachel Leskovac) comes back to work to show everyone her new baby daughter.

She's popular, relaxed and genuinely well liked - all the things that bossy, ambitious Julie isn't, but would kill to be.

Actually, Jane Horrocks is the least good thing about this series - she's just not awful or deluded enough to be another David Brent, plus she's doing it all in a northern version of the posh voice she used in the Tesco ads.

For my money, the best characters are Sue and Linda (Lorraine Cheshire and Faye McKeever) - a buy-one-get-one-free double act who have some splendidly dirty jokes.

Jane Horrocks trades Tesco for Valco in Trollied

Trollied. Check it out tonight on Sky1 HD. Definitely one to keep an eye on and then think about it the next time you're in a supermarket no matter where you are and see just how close life comes to imitating art and vice versa.

Trollied may come from the school of Shameless - via director Paul Walker and lead writer Julie Rutterford - but it's a very different can of beans. Set in a budget supermarket in the North, it offers gentle humour and finds amusement in the familiar and the peculiar. Broad-based and character-led, the opening double bill offers promise of good things to come, with a cast that includes the fabulous Jane Horrocks as a prissy and insecure interim deputy manager, Mark Addy as the supermarket butcher, and Jason Watkins as exasperated manager Gavin.

You would not want to put it to her this way, but there is clearly something about Jane Horrocks that says "supermarket". A former star of a long-running Tesco ad, Horrocks stars here in a new sitcom about the employees of Valco supermarket. It's neither surreal nor pathos-filled, instead it forms another addition to producer Ash Atalla's stable of shows that take a slightly edgy look at the utterly commonplace. Mark Addy and cool newcomer Joel Fry are among the other quality comedy talents lurking in the aisles.

Sky1's really started amping up its original content recently and the latest result is brand new comedy Trollied. Is this going to be the supermarkets' answer to The Office? It's hard to tell straight away, but the cast is certainly strong - the fabulously expressive Jane Horrocks takes her place alongside Mark Addy who, fresh from being a king on Game of Thrones, becomes a butcher who really knows his bacon. Jason Watkins, Chanel Cresswell and Nick Blood are among the other stars joining the lineup at budget store Valco, so settle in for a double bill (or, um, buy one, get one free) and we'll see if it gets us rolling in the aisles (it's got to do better than that pun, for sure).

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