Jonathan Owen

Meera Syal interview

Growing up as part of the only Indian family in a West Midlands mining village meant the actress and writer was always an outsider. And that, she says, was a very good thing. Jonathan Owen meets Meera Syal.

What's next for Britain's oldest schoolboys?

As Channel 4's hugely successful comedy about sex-obsessed sixth-formers ends, its stars look ahead - and somehow keep it clean. Jonathan Owen meets The Inbetweeners.

Likely Lads fall out: Bolam refuses to sanction repeats

Former co-stars' simmering 35-year feud boils over.

Stepping up to the oche with the aim of spearing the cult of minor celebrity in its hollow Hello! heart, Irvine Welsh's Good Arrows took the fly-on-the-wall documentary and ripped the tail feathers off it. The saga of Andy 'The Arrows' Samson promised a cautionary sign of the times.

The timing was spot on. Darts is flying high so it was easy to swallow the idea of a small-town double-top hero seduced by a fleeting brush with fame. And Jonathan Owen was perfect as Andy, a beguiling mix of the innocent and the grasping, his ego buffed and fluffed to the catchy strains of Colin MacIntryre's should-be hit song You're A Star. As Andy suffered the slings and arrows of outraged misfortune, Owen actually made you feel sorry for him.

Set amid the disappearing world of working men's clubs in South Wales, Good Arrows could have made more of its bleak setting. But Welsh seemed to be going for broad comedy rather than sharp satire and some of the performances, notably Katy Brand as Andy's wife Big Stella, were comedy cliches that took a sledgehammer to subtlety. For all its notable ambition, Good Arrows never quite hit the bullseye.

Good Arrows, Dean Cavanagh and Irvine Welsh's pastiche documentary about a Welsh darts champion fallen on hard times, contained one very good performance, from Jonathan Owen as the "Beckham of Darts", and some nice lines. "What makes you think you'll get cancer, Andy?" asked the off-screen director at one point. "Well, cancer's very popular now, isn't it?" Andy replied witlessly. Unfortunately, there were too many performances that couldn't quite match it. As his mercenary wife, Big Sheila, Katy Brand treated every scene as a sketch, rolling her eyes and milking the gag in a way that completely disabled the attempt at low-key documentary realism. As a result, the dart hit the wires and bounced out.

Irvine Welsh makes his feature-film directorial debut in this dark comedy-drama set in the world of South Wales professional darts. Katy Brand and Jonathan Owen (of her own Big Ass Show and Shameless respectively) are the two stars and - as always with Welsh - this is an almost farcical, sometimes obscene production. But there's a point too: satirising minor celebrity, the drama focuses on a formerly great darts player (Owen) and his place in a society still ravaged by pit closures and social deprivation. The script takes pot shots at the standards of modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and there's a cameo from darts star Richie Burnett.