Johnny Depp

DVD review: Life's Too Short

Life's Too Short, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, is clever series with a whole host of guest appearances to savour, including one Johnny Depp.

Despite some brilliant cameos from Liam Neeson and Johnny Depp, we're thrilled to see Ricky Gervais leave Life's Too Short behind and return to the workplace sitcom. Gervais' new Channel 4 special is set in a retirement home and features the acting debut of An Idiot Abroad presenter Karl Pilkington as Dougie the caretaker. While some (particularly fellow comic Stewart Lee in the Guardian) have pre-emptively damned Derek as insulting, others are praising the script and calling for a full series - all we know is that we can guarantee #derek will be trending on twitter tonight...

Life's Too Short couldn't even be saved by Johnny Depp

It's easy, but fair, to compare Gervais' latest series to The Office and Extras and unfortunately Life's Too Short just doesn't stand up to the comparison.

Life's Too Short - The Depp Ep review

Last night's episode was the one where Johnny Depp, like Liam Neeson last week, turned up for the most arbitrary of imaginable reasons and then proceeded to 'send himself up'.

Life's Too Short: episode two, BBC Two, review

Patrick Smith enjoyed the second episode of Life's Too Short, which guest starred Johnny Depp.

The clout of Ricky Gervais never ceases to amaze. Not only can he get away with insulting Johnny Depp at the Golden Globes, now he's got him guest starring in his new series.

Depp, who appears as an odious version of himself, is brilliantly appalling as he employs Warwick Davis to coach him for a part where he plays Rumpelstiltskin.

The gag in this series is how everyone thinks it's OK to treat Davis badly as he's small.

Watching Johnny Depp play the recorder while Davis has to ­Riverdance is off the comedy Richter scale. But there's worse at a sci-fi ­convention, where Davis is quizzed by a crass reporter.

Even though these scenes are made up, I bet they're ­exaggerated versions of situations Davis has encountered.

But we could have done without his own tasteless best man speech. This works best when the joke is on everyone else, not him.

In this second episode, Johnny Depp jokes that Gervais left Twitter because it had 140 characters, 139 more than Gervais has ever come up with. It's a self-reflexive piece of comedy: Gervais wrote the script, so is mocking himself, and he caused a storm on Twitter, for different reasons. But Warwick Davis, while brilliant, is very much the same character Gervais created in Extras and The Office - the deluded twonk, forever finding new ways to be humiliated. His ordeals tonight include a brutal improv session with Depp. It's excruciating, but also brilliantly, transgressively funny.

This time around, co-writer Ricky Gervais has his 3ft 6in protagonist Warwick Davies involved in an excruciating improv session with Johnny Depp - before turning the humour on to himself. When Depp turns up in Gervais's office, he jokes how the comedian came off Twitter because it had 140 characters... '139 more than he has ever managed to come up with' - a cracking piece of self-reflexive comedy that's all too aware of the ghost of David Brent hanging over it. The formula ain't fresh, but it still raises plenty of bold, daring laughs.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant only appear briefly, but their stamp is all over this sitcom, with Warwick Davis as the showbiz dwarf who is essentially Gervais by proxy, and his worse than useless female assistant in the Merchant role. The humour is progressive - where else would Davis get a leading role like this? - yet too constantly fixated on height for jokes. Tonight, Davis wangles work both as a consultant to Johnny Depp and a guest gig at a wedding, but the centrepiece of this episode is embittered, fragile Depp's showdown with Gervais in his office, vengeance for the roasting he got at the Golden Globes.

Belly laughs and cringe-making moments vie for supremacy in the second episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's painfully funny new comedy. As dwarf star Warwick Davis attempts to get his career off the ground again, a request from Johnny Depp for advice on how to play Rumpelstiltskin in a new film project looks like the break he's been waiting for. But he hasn't reckoned on the actor finding out about his friendship with Gervais - who singled Depp's flop The Tourist out for special mention during his scathing hosting of the 2011 Golden Globe awards.