Mackenzie Crook

Katherine Jakeways' tale of a small town preparing for a talent show is a comedy cracker. Penelope Wilton, Mackenzie Crook and Sheila Hancock lead the cast in what is a tender look at British eccentricity, community and a slideshow featuring inappropriate images of Victorian ladies, and also a very funny half-hour.

Oddly enough, North by Northamptonshire doesn't spell 'bugger all' backwards, although that is roughly the message emitted by playwright Katherine Jakeways about small-town life. With a narrator helicoptering above the characters, whose innermost impulses are purportedly revealed, the drama is clearly begging to be compared to Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, set in Llareggub with its famously mischievous spelling... in its dreams.

For while Thomas' dramatis personae, in all their disappointed, perverted, mixed-up reality are revealed in subliminal flashes and dreams, Jakeways' people bare all in daylight. Vomit, infertility, yawn-inducing pubescent fantasies and the loneliness of the middle-aged divorcee contemplating a Jane Austen box-set and a bag of chocolate raisins are variously presented for our consumption. It is at once too much information and not enough. Everything is regurgitated 9 to 5, leaving these characters with all the backstory of Teletubbies.

While Thomas had two narrators, one delineating conscious activity, the other overseeing the subterranean world of the psyche, here there is just one, the estimable Sheila Hancock. Poor Sheila Hancock, she sounds as if she doesn't know where to look. Her magisterial yet subtle inflexions are completely wasted as she introduces the supermarket manager (Mackenzie Crook), who jokes over the tannoy about vomit in the aisles, so she settles for a faintly reproving note. Penelope Wilton's wonderfully dolorous tones are also underemployed as the producer of a talent contest, gently prodding the posh teenager, whose interest in history is entirely based on the amount of cleavage on show in portraits.

Jakeways has another role beyond that of author. She plays Esther, the most obnoxious character of all, who indulges in public humiliation of her husband (Kevin Eldon) for his failure to make her pregnant. If Esther was a finely-crafted suburban gorgon, a creature at once excessive and yet explicable, a Lady Macbeth or Miss Havisham of the boot-making shire, this would make sense. Actually this was another case of a woman diminishing a man, because that has become as acceptable as the opposite is unacceptable.

The residents of a small town in Northamptonshire like everything to be nice - even the local homeless man is tastefully dressed in Boden. Sheila Hancock is the deadpan narrator for the opening episode of this spiffing new comedy series, starring Mackenzie Crook.

A new four-part series with the potential to become a classic in the Little Britain mode. An all-star cast - Sheila Hancock, Mackenzie Crook, Penelope Wilton, Felicity Montagu and Kevin Eldon - star in Katherine Jakeways' comedy about stultifying small-town obscurity, where middle-aged no-hopers live lives of quiet desperation and the young leave town at the earliest opportunity.

The laughs are cruel, but the monsters of suburbia are curiously sympathetic, and the characters so well drawn and well played that this could run and run.

Mackenzie Crook: More than just the Office boy

Mackenzie Crook is famous for playing Gareth in that sitcom but, as his recent stints in the West End prove, he's no gormless sidekick.

Who could have foretold, when The Office was first aired in 2001, that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's comedy series would go on to be shown in 80 countries, "break" America and win a Golden Globe award? Tonight, BBC Two delights Wernham Hogg fans with a re-airing of the entire first series (six episodes). The programmes are interspersed with interviews with the cast, including Ricky Gervais, Mackenzie Crook and Martin Freeman. Comedy bigwigs - Richard Curtis and Ben Stiller among them - also offer their thoughts on the inimitable series.

Tonight, BBC Two is screening all six episodes of the first series of The Office, the landmark comedy that transformed the sound of fingernails being dragged down a blackboard into laughter. And like the commentary on a DVD, the episodes are interspersed with insights from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the co-stars Martin Freeman, Lucy Davis and Mackenzie Crook, and famous fans including Richard Curtis, Ben Stiller and Hugh Jackman.

Taking the Flak (BBC2), which competes for the same airtime, begins promisingly enough. Harry, the local stringer in Karibu, is doing a piece to camera: "This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." (Any plague-spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.) Over his shoulder, the cheerful life of Karibu pursued the even tenor of its way.

At this point the BBC's visiting firemen arrived, to cover the crisis, led by Martin Jarvis (playing, lets face it, John Simpson), and it all went to hell in a handcart. (Perhaps Susie Dent can explain the handcart.) The plot was chaotic. The locals were not always intelligible. And I am very sorry for the woman from the World Service who had to mime incessant diarrhoea. You wonder if the trip to Kenya was worth the shilling, as some of the funniest scenes were back at the BBC where Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) was holding the fort with minimal fortitude ("The editor of the six is literally foaming at the mouth. He bit a picture researcher").

Andy Hamilton was asked recently why he stopped writing Drop the Dead Donkey, the granddaddy of this genre, and he said you couldn't keep up. Damien Day - GlobeLink's shameless star reporter - putting a teddy bear on a bombed building would be considered quite mild now.

This could be Drop The Dead Donkey on location as we fly out with the BBC's foreign news pack to report on the strife-ridden African country of Karibu. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," junior reporter Harry Chambers (Bruce Mackinnon) explains. "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton. Perhaps even a one-off drama by Richard Curtis."

A commissioning editor would green-light the script on the strength of that line alone. As the BBC's big guns fly to Karibu to steal Harry's thunder, the laughs come as much from the characters as the situation - like the mumsy World Service lady who compares Africa's roads with pot-holes in Putney.

But the best gags come from TV Centre back in London where producer Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) is busy making Daleks out of his used coffee cups.

Tonightly, which began a daily run on Friday, is the distant descendant of The 11 O'Clock Show, not much valued at the time but now hailed for giving early breaks to Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen and Mackenzie Crook.

I tried, believe me, but I could not see any of this sample of what C4 is calling "Generation Next" entering their league. The most obvious, if minor, talent is its northern anchorman, Jason Manford, who sits behind a desk betraying amusement at his own monologue and congratulating his sidekick, Andi Osho, on her supposedly "great work, great work". The first edition was topical: much obsessed with gas bills and the acquittal of Barry George, whom Manford weirdly suggested would not be in a good mood.

Tonightly lacked edge and it lacked laughs. It has three weeks to find bothly.