John Simpson (I)

This new comedy series was co-created by a journalist, co-filmed by a cameraman who's won RTS awards for reporting - and viewers may notice more than a little of foreign affairs editor John Simpson in fictional correspondent David Bradburn (played by Martin Jarvis). When war breaks out in the fictional African country of Karibu, where the child soldiers play football with Kalashnikovs for goalposts, the first BBC news television crew arrives, it seems, within minutes. The BBC's local stringer, Harry Chambers (Bruce Mackinnon), think he's about to win his first news scoop, but is promptly gazumped by his senior colleague, Bradburn, who flies into town and files his first flak-jacketed piece to camera without a jot of Karibu knowledge in his head. There's an over-reliance on fart jokes and Carry On farce here - at one point a dog is blown up by a land mine, splattering Chambers in "comedy" blood. The show bares its satirical teeth, though, in the plausible way it sends up the BBC news game's preening hierarchy. The reporters all clamour for precious minutes on "The One", "The Six" or "The Ten". Suddenly, the satire starts to ring true. It's just strange that a spoof of war reporting didn't want to take itself, well, a little more seriously.

There must have been a lot of wicked fun in the making of this series, which does for foreign correspondents what Drop the Dead Donkey did for a television newsroom. A senior foreign correspondent (Martin Jarvis) and his crew arrive in Africa to cover the outbreak of war. But the fighting is nowhere near as fierce as the rivalry between this grand old man of journalism, a young local stringer who resents having his thunder stolen, and a battered BBC World Service correspondent. Although much of the comedy is broad, it could have been written only by an insider and much of the jollity comes from sharing an in-joke. One of the writers was Tira Shubart, a producer and journalist who lived with John Simpson for ten years.