Mackenzie Crook

Produced by Baby Cow and featuring the likes of Steve Coogan and Julia Davis in future episodes, these delicious sub-half-hour productions recall a lost age of relatively low-budget TV treatment of the classics. In the opener, Johnny Vegas is perfectly cast as the put-upon Tolkachov, who visits his friend Murashkin (Mackenzie Crook) to deliver a spittle-flecked monologue full of pathos and purgatory about his put-upon working and domestic life, only to get more, or rather less, than he bargained for, in the apparently sympathetic Crook's eventual response.

Interview: The Office's Mackenzie Crook

Mackenzie Crook, former star of The Office, tells Metro.co.uk why he doesn't feel like a proper stage actor or at ease as a celebrity as he takes on a new play.

New four-part comedy of the reflective kind, set in a small town bubbling with hope, fear and mistrust, a bit like an inland English Under Milk Wood, faintly reminiscent of Peter Tinniswood's lively studies in eccentricity. By Katherine Jakeways, it has the great benefit of Sheila Hancock as narrator, Mackenzie Crook as Rod, the supermarket manager, and the author herself as Esther, the very assertive instructor of both driving and judo. The overall plot is how they're all getting ready for a talent night, produced by Mary (fab Penelope Wilton).

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.