John Henshaw

The new sitcom Early Doors is a sort of kid of The Royle Family, but now being raised by the father alone. The series was being written by that show's co-creators, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, until, we may guess, she decided that a show set in a pub was not the perfect subject for her at the moment. She left and Cash co-opted a new dialogue buddy, Phil Mealey.

Cash has said that the plan had been for Aherne to play a landlady but that they had difficulty imagining the character. But Cash's admission raises the project's main problem, which is that pubs are as familiar a part of television as televisions are of pubs.

In fact, one of the reasons that The Royle Family was so daring was that experience of the medium led you to expect that they must eventually get off their arses and go to the pub, but they never did. Early Doors aims for the same claustrophobia by trapping the characters on one set, but people stuck on alehouse benches don't have the same visual shock as a whole family beached on a settee.

Shot in dirty light without a laughter-track, the show begins with landlord Ken (John Henshaw) in his empty empire, decanting cheap brandy into a posher bottle and diverting the charity box into the till.

The regulars arrive and exchange banalities ("temporary traffic lights over at Samuel Street"), inanities ("Joe's having a shit"), incomprehensible in-jokes and semi-derelict slang ("Keep your hand on your halfpenny"). Future plot possibilities are laid down: Ken's daughter isn't actually his and there's also doubt about the father of her own child. Many scenes take place in the gents, the soundtrack featuring the meticulous drip of piss and plop of shit.

In the modern style - The Office, Phoenix Nights - it's the kind of comedy that should come with a bottle of paracetamol or a length of rubber tubing for the car. The theme could be described as the loneliness of company. It's potentially brilliant, but the pisser is that viewers have spent so much time in pubs. Though in Aherne's absence they've sensibly dispensed with a landlady, Ken keeps tripping over Al Murray's pub landlord.

Mark Lawson, The Guardian, 12th May 2003