Mark Heap

When a sitcom arrives tagged with a premise so flimsy a butterfly could tear it asunder, it had better be something special. In the case of Seann Walsh vehicle Monks, serial benefit fraudster Gary Woodcroft evades prosecution by ... joining a monastery. Essentially it's One Flew Over The Nimmo's Nest. Sadly, the torturous proposition isn't backed by anything approaching gilted ribaldry, with a decent cast including Mark Heap and Angus Deayton reduced to delivering insultingly sub-panto fare throughout.

Radio Times review

"New and daring projects" were what comedy exec Shane Allen promised with this season of comedy pilots. This showcase doesn't feel as daring as a sitcom set in a monastery might once have done - when, for instance, a previous version of this project appeared on Radio 2 in 2000 and in an unbroadcast pilot in 2008, long before viewers gave clerical sitcoms their blessing via Rev.

This is worlds away from Rev.; it's a traditional studio sitcom with broad characters and pleasantly cartoony storylines - a bell falling out of a bell tower, drunken monks, and so on. Seann Walsh plays Brother Gary, who fled to the monastery to escape a conviction for benefit fraud. Mark Heap plays the monastery's second-in-charge, a former air traffic controller fuming with pent-up anger, and Justin Edwards looks promising as Brother Bernard, who likes a tipple.

Monks is hard to get Revved up about

Tonight, BBC One airs Monks, a comedy pilot in which Seann Walsh plays benefits cheat Gary who has joined a monastic order in an attempt to evade the fuzz. Co-starring James Fleet as the Abbott and Mark Heap - doing a good Mark Heap - as the Monk who hates Gary it's... it's... well it's OK. But it does seem to smack of a return to the bad old days of religious-based comedy.

Mark Heap: Mr Zany buttons up

From Green Wing's creepy consultant to the resident artist on Spaced, Mark Heap is TV's go-to oddball. Now he returns to the stage as Jeeves and, in person, seems curiously straightforward.

Mark Heap & Robert Webb take over Jeeves and Wooster

Green Wing and Peep Show stars will replace Stephen Mangan and Matthew Macfadyen in Perfect Nonsense from April.

Very last episode of the witty social satire, blessed by a superb cast (Ian McDiarmid, Mark Heap and Michael Feast), written and directed by Andrew McGibbon. McDiarmid plays the wily head of a school which has gone through many transformations and whose past pupils duly represent the fact, whether pillars of the establishment, captains of industry or various other grades of dodgy geezer. Now meet Faye (Elaine Cassidy) who will save its site from mercantile exploitation to transform it into a beacon of the new educational ethos.

This long-running black comedy starring Ian McDiarmid as Dr Pickerskill, a retired English master looking back at the lives of his most entertaining pupils at Haunchurst School, draws to a close with a special send-off. In The Final Report, written by Andrew McGibbon, Pickerskill has to contend with a charismatic cult leader called Faye, whose shady sect, The Constancy, is planning to take over the college. Elaine Cassidy and Mark Heap also star.

Wednesday evenings will be dull without Eric. As this neat little four-parter draws to a close, the Faustian tale reaches its fiery depths as the frankly hopeless team of time travellers find themselves in Hell.

Fortunately for petulant human teenage spell hacker Eric (Will Howard) and jinxed junior wizard Rincewind (the understated comic genius that is Mark Heap), the King of Hell's demons are easily confused and distracted. And then there's the infernal bureaucracy to tackle. But have our anti-heroes learnt their lessons and will Eric ever get to return to his bedroom?

The devil only knows and he's not telling.

Anyone familiar with the work of Jenny Eclair will recognise her hand in this madcap, slightly ramshackle new comedy. Eclair co-wrote the story with Julie Balloo about washed-up, middle-aged, divorced Fleet Street journalist Ros, who has ended up living in her childhood village of Norton Tripton.

The only job she can get is working for her monstrous ex's sister, who runs the local tourist website - but is patently not happy doing stories about flower displays. Eclair has great fun portraying Ros's angry desperation at how her life has detoured into a cul-de-sac as her ex-husband's career goes stratospheric, while Mark Heap brings his trademark oddball schtick to the role of her sidekick.

It's a riotous farce that reminded me of the stories of Tom Sharpe in its eccentric characters and extreme situations.