Jo Enright

The Job Lot, set in a West Midlands Job Centre, was really rather loveable. Russell Tovey as a beleaguered dole-claim clerk, Sarah Hadland as his anxious boss, plus an ensemble cast featuring an anally retentive toxic pen-pusher (Jo Enright, one of Britain's best character actresses), the long-term professionally idle Sophie McShera (Downton Abbey) plus the glorious Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions and Utopia). Russell Tovey's delightful "stick your job up your arse" strop, followed a mere 10 minutes later by a complete volte-face genuinely made me gleeful. In fact, I could watch Sophie McShera argue with Russell Tovey about why she can't take any of the jobs on offer for the entire episode. Tovey: "Greggs, the bakery, 15 hours a week?" McShera: "I'm wheat-intolerant".

If Vicious was a throwback - or homage - to 1970s sitcom, complete with its numbing laughter track, then The Job Lot was by contrast a thoroughly modern confection, all faux-naturalistic acting, mundane setting - a job centre - and no laughter track. There was an obvious debt to The Office, but it's Twenty Twelve that it most resembled in tone and humour.

Jobcentres are funny, in the sense of strange, places. The one I used to frequent in the early 1980s featured the serial killer Dennis Nilsen on its staff. It's not easy to work that scenario into a sitcom, I grant you, but you take my point: there's a quality that's not quite right about them, perhaps owing to the well-founded suspicion that they are the very last place you'd go to find a job.

The opener for The Job Lot didn't capture that weirdness, but it did have some sharpish observations on modern working manners. The best gag concerned the absurdity of phones taking precedence over physical presence as one of the staff, surly Angela (Jo Enright), insisted that a customer in front of her call to book an appointment. When he took out his mobile and did just that, she answered and told him to hold, then looked up and explained that mobile phones were not allowed in the jobcentre.

Nothing else worked as neatly as that. Most sitcoms require a central comic presence and, while Vicious has at least one too many, The Job Lot didn't appear to have one. That may change once the situation has been properly established. It may even start to get funny.

Though I didn't enjoy Vicious, I found that its companion piece The Job Lot had a lot to offer. Set in the West Midlands-based Brownhill Job Centre this focused on the staff and clients neither of whom particularly wanted to work.

Our hero of sorts is Karl (Russell Tovey) a young man who imagined he'd have a successful career after he got his art degree but has found himself working in a job he hates. He is constantly frustrated by trying to find work for people like Bryony (Sophie McShera) who blatantly don't want a job and just turn up so they can keep claiming benefits.

In this first episode Karl briefly quits the Job Centre only to return when he discovers that pretty temp Chloe (Emma Rigby) is due to start working there. However this new incentive is a short-lived one after he finds out that Chloe has a boyfriend and also that she'll be leaving after Danielle (Tamla Kari) returns from maternity leave early. Meanwhile manager Trish (Sarah Hadland) is irked by the return of Angela (Jo Enright) who took Trish to court after she fired her. It now appears as if Angela will be doing as little work as possible while Trish continues to head towards an inevitable breakdown.

While The Job Lot is far from perfect I found it to be well-observed with a couple of clever gags scattered throughout. In my daily life I've encountered people like Angela and Briony both of whom are bought to life perfectly by Enright and McShera. Meanwhile the programme also has a likeable lead in the form of Russell Tovey's Karl who gets through his day with the help of a drawer full of biscuits. Tovey is always an endearing screen presence and here his likeability is put to full use. I also thought Sarah Hadland was perfectly cast as the increasingly stressed Trish who is the perfect personification of the harassed boss.

Though The Job Lot does have some clunky moments, I found it to be a likeable sitcom with plenty to offer. Still I don't think it deserves its place on primetime television just yet and should've maybe been placed on ITV2 instead. I'm also not sure why it's been grouped with Vicious as the two have very little in common and will attract very different audiences.

The Job Lot got off to a very strong start.

Sarah Hadland stars as Trish, the manager of a West Midlands job centre, recently returned from stress-related sickness leave. Ostensibly sunny and positive - "turn the unemployed into the fun employed" is her motto - Trish struggles to maintain the facade in a work environment beset by resentment, hostility, despair, defeatism and bureaucracy. And that's before they open up to the public.

The show is essentially an ensemble piece - a uniformly excellent cast includes Russell Tovey, Jo Enright and Emma Rigby - but it is Hadland's understated, poignant portrayal of brittle optimism under unbearable stress that holds it all together. It is good to see Hadland, best known as Miranda Hart's sidekick Stevie in the former's eponymous sitcom, emerging from Hart's shadow as a fine comic actor in her own right.

The Job Lot is a more interesting sitcom than Vicious. If Vicious feels pre-The Office, then this Midlands job centre-based comedy is more like Office copy. The mundane work environment, the juddery camera work ... it's not actually in mockumentary style, but it does look and sound a bit similar. Still, better to make something that feels like comedy from 10 years ago than 20, I suppose.

Ooooh, nas-tee. No, it really is better, because it's not just about the delivery of one-liners, it's about characters and situations that are nicely observed and recognisable. I love Jo Enright's Angela, a walking tribunal (almost certainly against you) who sucks the life and joy from the workplace. Every office has one, even this one. You know who you are, XXXXXXX XXXXXXX. Or maybe you don't ...

Nice performances from untitled Russell Tovey and Sarah Hadland too, acting with a lowercase a, which is sometimes preferable and a relief after the other. There's no audience laughter either, which is a certainly a relief. I could have done without the comedy plinky plonky music, though. I know when I find something funny; I don't need to be told by the music.

If Vicious and The Job Lot are ITV's big, triumphant, we're-back-to-prime-time-comedy fanfare, I'm wobbling a flat palm-down hand from side to side. Mmm, mixed. A bit safe and unadventurous, as you'd probably expect. Lower on LOLs than The Inbetweeners, or Peep Show, or Hunderby, or Him & Her, or lots of other funny recent shows not on ITV.

Nobody laughs for you in The Job Lot, which is full of those poised silences that are a feature of modern sitcom style, as non sequiturs falter to a stop or a character is left to silently absorb the absurdity of someone else's behaviour. But there is plenty for you to laugh at yourself. Sarah Hadland plays Trish, the job centre manager, in a way that makes you completely forget her more cartoonish performance as Stevie in Miranda, and Russell Tovey appears as Karl, a disenchanted employee who walks out after dealing with a particularly reluctant job seeker, and then walks straight back in again when he catches sight of the beautiful new temp.

There's a nice turn by Jo Enright too as Angela, a surly bureaucratic jobsworth. Most importantly, the comedy lies not in the lines as such but somewhere between what's said and how it's said. "I'd go mad if he wasn't here... I really would," says Trish brightly, commending Karl to the new girl. "I'd self-harm." And then, instead of the grating coercion of mass guffawing you get an awkward silence, as Trish realises she's said too much and the other characters try to think how to fill the gap. In my case, it was filled with a laugh.

The Job Lot is set in a busy West Midlands Job Centre and will focus on the relationships between the people that work there and the people that don't work there, or anywhere else for that matter.

This fly-on-the-wall comedy, set in a Birmingham employment centre, will take a little time to bed in, while we get to know the manager on the brink of a nervous breakdown (Sarah Hadland from Miranda) and the frustrated arts graduate on the dole counter (TV veteran Russell Tovey).

The obstreperous Angela (Jo Enright) was instantly recognisable. She's one of the awkward squad as only British public services can make 'em. Refusing to open the office until exactly 9am, handing out the wrong forms on purpose, and cutting hunks off a block of cheddar with a pair of office scissors: Angela was perfectly observed.

Sarah Hadland (Miranda's Stevie) and Russell Tovey head up the second of tonight's ITV sitcom double-bill. It's Trollied relocated to a job centre, with manager Trish and pet underling Karl tackling the trials and tribulations of the poor souls stuck on both sides of the counter. Frustrated Karl badly wants out - until a gorgeous temp (Emma Rigby) shows up. While over at front desk, newly-redundant job-seeker Sunil (Teachers' Navin Chowdhry) can't get past miserable jobsworth Angela (Jo Enright).

A comedy set in a job centre in the Midlands - doesn't exactly sound like a bundle of laughs, does it? And while the script doesn't aim to pump out one-liners like Vicious, The Job Lot has sharply observed characters played by a classy ensemble cast. Among them are Sarah Hadland (Stevie from Miranda) as neurotic manager Trish; Russell Tovey as daydreamer Karl, so fed up with his dead-end job he'd almost rather join the dole queue; and Jo Enright as Angela, the Rosemary West of careers advisers.

The shadow of The Office looms over this new sitcom, set in Brownall Job Centre in the West Midlands, and it largely delivers, thanks to a cracking script and some winning performances. Brittle, nervy Trish (Miranda star Sarah Hadland) runs the office, aided by frustrated graduate Karl (Russell Tovey), and the marvellously dour Angela (Life's Too Short's Jo Enright), among the regular staff and jobseekers. This week sees a display of petty bureaucracy from Angela, while Karl uses his degree in an ill-judged manner.