Nina Conti

In the new sitcom Family Tree, Eeyore-faced Chris O'Dowd plays Tom Chadwick, a recently cuckolded, jobless single who's inherited an old photo of someone he believes to be his great-grandfather. Tom embarks on a search to know more about his ancestors, discovering ever more exotic and esoteric branches of his genealogy. He's accompanied by his hapless pal Pete and sister Bea (the ventriloquist Nina Conti), who, due to a traumatic childhood incident in a zoo, now voices her more unorthodox opinions via a hand puppet called Monkey.

This is a very funny comedy and, watching preview episodes on my computer with headphones on, I chortled out loud about six times (a risky thing to do when colleagues all around are ploughing through an Ed Miliband speech). The series is a send-up of kin-hunting series such as Who Do You Think You Are? and Long Lost Family, and because tracking down one's forebears could lead to just about anything, both possibility and improbability are built in. As a documentary spoof, it's more farcical and less 'realistic' than, say, The Office. Nobody really questions the presence of Monkey.

Conscious of its own meta-ness, the show makes fun of different genres, often via its characters watching telly or DVDs, so we get treated to snippets of a mock BBC2 historical soap, or a cringe-inducing flashback to a 70s sitcom. One thing about these TV-within-TV moments, though. It's become increasingly the done thing, in our overly politically correct times, for hip, knowing comedies to get safe laughs by showing terribly un-PC things via the filter of a terribly un-PC character (in this case, Tom's dad). We're supposed to be laughing at, not with, the character. In reality, of course, we're doing both. I find the PC brigade tedious in the extreme, but it seems to me that, if you believe one shouldn't depict Indians with waggly heads, then don't depict them, full-stop. You can't poke fun by proxy. That's having your gluten-free cake and eating it too.

Co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, pioneer of the mock-documentary format, Family Tree stars Chris O'Dowd as a man intent on tracing his family history.

The performances are naturalistic, the pace leisurely, the humour gentle, the focus meandering and the format flexible enough to include mock-doc TV interviews - despite it not being set up as a documentary - and for Nina Conti, who plays O'Dowd's sister, to employ her ventriloquist puppet monkey as a co-star.

The show is amiable, entertaining, whimsical and intriguing, but - a terrific blind date scene notwithstanding - it doesn't seem that bothered about being funny.

Family Tree is an odd kind of affair. It's been created by comedy aristocracy (it's co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, who created This Is Spinal Tap), but it came across in this first episode as amateurishly awkward, funny in a desultory kind of way at one moment, startlingly clunky at others.

Chris O'Dowd stars as Tom, an out-of-work risk assessor triggered to research his ancestral past by a bequest from a great-aunt, and Nina Conti plays his sister Bea, complete with the monkey vent doll, explained here as the result of childhood therapy for elective mutism ("she hadn't skoken in weeks," the monkey helpfully explains). The dialogue has the loose, bantering style of improvisation - which gives it a warmth and realism to counterbalance the slightly effortful zaniness - and the style (in a half-hearted way) is mock-documentary.

The format doesn't make much sense. Why would anyone be making a film about Tom and his family, particularly since the mission to explore the past hasn't even occurred to him at the beginning of the episode? Besides, there doesn't seem to be any real tension between the actuality sequences and the more formal talking-head interviews that occasionally pop up (in the style of Modern Family).

But it is Christopher Guest. Some of the character comedy, promisingly, is funny, in particular a sequence in which Tom went on a blind date with a very stupid girl ("There's been loads of sightings of dinosaurs in Africa," she assured him when he expressed polite doubt about their continued existence). Watch, in the hope of developments.

Watching this new Christopher Guest sitcom is a peculiar experience. For example, the pieces to camera can look like a hackneyed device, worn out through over-use. But then, if Christopher Guest can't utilise pieces to camera from his characters, who can? For a particular kind of arch, absurd, self-aware comedy, he wrote the rulebook.

This feels like a very new venture for Guest. Not only is Family Tree his first TV project, but it's more plot-heavy and open-ended than his film work: the box of family treasures given to laconic lost soul Tom Chadwick (Chris O'Dowd) could be the passport to as much digression, misadventure and silliness as Guest and the cast fancy, as Tom follows his familial trail through Britain and America.

The Family Tree ensemble also contains Michael McKean, Nina Conti, co-writer Jim Piddock, Tom Bennett and eventually, such mainstays of Guest's films as Fred Willard. So, even if this opening episode feels slightly low-key, it seems reasonable to assume that we're in safe comedic hands.

Chris O'Dowd brings his engaging brand of humour to the role of Tom Chadwick in this mockumentary from Christopher Guest (Best In Show, This Is Spinal Tap). When we join Chadwick, he's adjusting well to a life of 'wallowing' after being dumped by his girlfriend and redundancy from work. Then things perk up, after the sad demise of a great-aunt who leaves 'a little something' for him. Not, as it happens, a cash windfall but a tatty old chest stuffed with family knick-knacks that lead him on an ancestral adventure. With support from Nina Conti as Tom's sister, Bea, who lets out her inner voice through her ventriloquist puppet, Monkey.

This gently off-the-wall mockumentary marks the return, after a seven-year break, of Christopher Guest, the writer-actor-director responsible for [o]Best In Show[/i], A Mighty Wind and, of course, This Is Spinal Tap. This latest one features Bridesmaids and The IT Crowd star Chris O'Dowd, who plays a man tracing his family history. Mike McKean and Nina Conti (and Monkey) are his dad and sister; the latter was once sent to a therapist after a puffin touched itself inappropriately while looking directly at her. Glorious.

Nina Conti: I almost wrote myself out of Family Tree

Ventriloquist jokes that watching Chris O'Dowd in the improvised Christopher Guest comedy meant she left herself with no lines.

The career of actress, comedian and, of course, ventriloquist Nina Conti is, quite deservedly, beginning to take off. Her BBC4 documentary A Ventriloquist's Story - Her Master's Voice was nominated for a 2013 BAFTA, while the sitcom Family Tree, in which she appears with Irish actor Chris O'Dowd, has recently premiered on US TV channel HBO, before it arrives on BBC2 later this year.

Yes, Nina Conti Really Is on the Radio is apparently a pilot episode, but on the evidence of this first instalment there would be no justice if a series wasn't commissioned as a result.

If truth be told, a relatively high percentage of new radio comedy rarely lives up to expectations, so it is a joy to come across a rather old-fashioned light entertainment format with enough of a modern edge to entertain contemporary audiences.

There is charm, self-deprecating wit and originality about the way Conti interacts with her puppets - on this occasion Monkey, Gran, Dog and old-time entertainer Charlie - and her special guests, physicist Jim Al-Khalili and former X Factor contestant Wagner, along with members of the live audience.

Listeners at home don't see Conti's technique, and have to settle with brief descriptions of the puppets, but none of that matters. At the beginning of the show, Monkey suggests that ventriloquism is a dead art, so it might as well make a suicide pact with another dying genre - radio. Fortunately, both seem to be blooming, and this programme proves why. Let's just hope that when a series is commissioned, the show is broadcast in an earlier time slot than 11pm.

If you think that ventriloquism, like darts, is something that couldn't work on the wireless, think again. In the first ventriloquism show on radio since Educating Archie 50 years ago, the dazzlingly talented Nina Conti brings some of her alter egos to Radio 4, including the cynical Monkey and Scots Granny (the original Granny dummy was a gift from her mentor, the late great Ken Campbell), and gives voice to puppets brought along by the audience.

Conti is a very funny woman, sometimes breathtakingly daring, but she keeps things simple for this pilot. And you'll never once see her lips move.

Archie Andrews was packed away in his box many years ago - but now, Nina Conti stephs forward to bring the art of ventriloquism on the radio back to live. Hers is an odd, slightly surreal act, but it's inventive and funny.