Pauline McLynn

Pauline McLynn to star in East is East tour

Father Ted actor Pauline McLynn is to star in a touring production of East is East, which originally ran in London as part of Jamie Lloyd's Trafalgar Transformed season.

A sitcom where the "sit" involves a man who - shock, horror - stays at home to look after his children while his wife goes to work. Imagine that! Unsurprisingly, the "com" here is severely lacking, unless you count skits about making cupcakes, vacuuming up Lego and drinking gin. This week Tom (Jason Byrne) enters the House Husband Of The Year competition, which gives his mum Mary (Pauline McLynn) the chance to administer a violent lesson on how to perfect his "mammy face", using a rubber glove as her weapon. Lame.

It appeared as if the BBC had little confidence in Father Figure from the get-go as it was broadcast in the post 10 O'Clock News death slot. Sitcoms previously scheduled in this slot include the horrid Citizen Khan and Ben Elton's recently atrocity The Wright Way.

To be fair to Father Figure, it was slightly better than both of those shows as it did have an innate likeability to it which was mainly due to the cast. At the same time though it had plenty of problems including one-note characters, a predictable script and gags you could see coming a mile-off.

The story of the first episode saw Tom Whyte (Jason Byrne) cooking a dinner for his neighbours to apologise for covering them in baked beans while they were trying to sunbathe. Then followed a well-worn script where the juvenile central character attempted to cook while fending off the interference from his family members. His mother (Pauline McLynn) tried to take over with the cooking while his friend Roddy (Michael Smiley) steals a giant cake from a hotel lobby. Meanwhile Tom's children are incredibly annoying and his wife Elaine (Karen Taylor) is presented as a serious alcoholic.

The episode climaxed with a scene which saw the neighbours being hit by the cake and covered in chocolate mousse while Tom's mother punched him in the face with a roast chicken. If any of these situations are putting a smile on your face then you probably would've enjoyed Father Figure more than I did.

The show was yet another addition to the list of poor sitcoms that have been produced in 2013 and to me Father Figure feels incredibly dated. As I said, the majority of the cast are incredibly likeable, particularly Pauline McLynn whose gift for physical comedy is put to good use here. But ultimately Father Figure feels doomed to fail and after watching the show I felt like Tom's neighbours - incredibly embarrassed and ever so slightly dirty.

Jason Byrne has a very endearing quality about him, which is just as well, as his new sitcom Father Figure has precious little else going for it.

Byrne plays a house husband attending to the domestic chores while his wife holds down a job and his two children go to school. He has a friend who pops round occasionally to distract him and tease him with comments about men in pinafores. That is the 'sit' part of the sitcom, and it is not exactly cutting edge.

The 'com' part just baffles me. It consists of a conveyor belt of silly moments and rudimentary sight gags loosely attached to a plot - and I use the term 'plot' in its widest possible sense. In the absence of any decent one-liners or characterisation, Byrne, the writer as well as star, attempts a frustratingly half-hearted surrealism, usually stuck on as fantasy inserts but which sometimes intrudes into the action itself.

To say that I didn't get the humour would be the grossest of understatements. The show seems to hover in a comedy limbo all its own, somewhere between the conformity of My Family and the madness of The Mighty Boosh, the end result being messy and unfocused.

The strange thing is that although I didn't laugh once, I didn't actually dislike Father Figure. As I said, Byrne is an amiable performer and has surrounded himself with an eminently watchable supporting cast, including Pauline McLynn and Peter Serafinowicz. Half an hour passes pleasantly enough, but I won't be rushing back to Father Figure anytime soon.

The success of Mrs Brown's Boys has left everything up for grabs, confirming that certain TV phenomena are just inexplicable. Who cares what critics think when viewers vote with their eyeballs in such large numbers? This Jason Byrne sitcom, transferred to telly from a Radio 2 series, is wretched: clichéd, derivative, predictable and crass. But that doesn't mean no one's going to like it.

Father Figure is trad. Looking to the gentler end of domestic comedy (Not Going Out, Outnumbered) for its inspiration, it leans towards the obvious at all times. Wondering what's going to happen to that large and elaborate cake in the living room? Don't expect to be surprised. But Byrne lacks Lee Mack's sheer relentlessness and the knack of taking things one step further than they might - done well by Outnumbered.

So Byrne's bumbling dad Tom just feels like an accumulation of his predecessors, but a dead end rather than a culmination. There are some decent performers in Father Figure including Michael Smiley and Pauline McLynn. But they just haven't been given anything to work with. Poor.

Jason Byrne created and stars in this sitcom as house husband Tom Whyte, whose attempts to be a domestic god result in chaos and grief, not helped by his rambunctious sons. A joke about a malfunctioning bathroom door evokes reminders of Outnumbered, which this isn't; it's more like a superficial sequence of calamities. However, an incident concerning some baked beans is well conceived, while Father Ted's Pauline McLynn, with her old-school vegetable-boiling methods, adds solid support.

Jason Byrne, veteran of the comedy stand-up circuit, makes the transition to TV sitcoms with this adaptation of his own Radio 2 series.

It's deeply traditional stuff - Byrne is a hopeless suburban dad (no, the title isn't riffing on George Michael) whose infuriated ineptitude is a source of endless hilarity to his chortling family.

Byrne's Irish so his mum is played by Pauline McLynn - because that's the sitcom law.

Another old-fashioned family sitcom involving an interfering Irish grandmother, broad slapstick and a studio audience? Mrs Brown's Boys has a lot to answer for.

Comedian Jason Byrne adapted this from his Radio 2 series. He plays groaningly hapless suburban dad Tom, who, in the opening moments, accidentally showers his prissy next-door neighbours with hot baked beans then pulls their garden fence down.

As he prepares a dinner to apologise, his eccentric family intervenes (Pauline McLynn plays his mad mother) and the meal spirals towards disaster via poo jokes, a stolen wedding cake, pratfalls and vomit.

Do you find it hilarious when small children say cheeky things like "poo!"? Do you shriek with delight when a grown man is unable to cook a meal without resorting to ironing the steak?

Do you find it wholly plausible that someone would steal a massive tiered wedding cake and bring it to a dinner party as their contribution to dessert? Do you find that watching people being repeatedly covered in food, falling over, or falling over into food makes you roll on the floor laughing? Then, just like the studio audience who go into paroxysms at every scene, you'll love Father Figure.

A sort of combination of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and those kids' shows where adults are constantly being gunked, Jason Byrne's sitcom is a transfer from Radio 2. His amiable stand-up persona is replicated as hapless but well-meaning dad to smart-arse kids, husband to past-caring just-open-the-wine wife, son to overbearing parents (Pauline McLynn as his mum is more glamorous than her Father Ted character Mrs Doyle but no less a nag), friend to a wasted Michael Smiley and neighbour to some cardboard people who are only there to react in horror to his gaffes.

The show is relentlessly middle-of-the-road, determinedly populist and wholly idiotic. Were it not for the sweary-words and a few double entendres, it would be pitched firmly as family entertainment and has clearly been commissioned to try to cash in on the unexpected success of Mrs Brown's Boys.

In its favour, I suppose it's a bit better than 
Ben Elton's megaflop 
The Wright Way. It will no doubt run 
for years.

"A funny family sitcom" is not a phrase I often find myself using these days. But this Jason Byrne creation is that rare thing - and it doesn't take a whole series to bed in. It's offered up a high percentage of laughs-per-line since its debut. That's partly due to the writing, of course, but equal credit must go to the ensemble cast.

Last week, I highlighted Pauline McLynn, who plays Jason's fictional mother, but the star of this episode is Dominic Applewhite (The King's Speech, The Inbetweeners) as belligerent son Dylan, who delivers such telling teenage lines as: "Don't leave me with Gran and Grandad - they smell of Countdown."