Peter Serafinowicz

A comedy giant in the making?

After years as the best-connected man in British comedy, this 6ft 5in Liverpudlian has his own BBC show, launched straight from YouTube on to primetime TV, but can his surreal humour now survive the mainstream?

From Spaced to Black Books to the very deeply brilliant Look Around You, P.S. (it's just easier on the RSI, frankly) invariably makes me laugh, as did his new sketch show, commissioned on the back of an amusing spoof showbiz news clip circulated on the interwebnet, and which was in every conceivable way the perfect giggly antidote to three hours of Murphy's Law.

P.S. is a brilliant impressionist, too - his uncanny Chris Tarrant, host of the absurd quiz show 'Heads or Tails', was only undermined by the premise not being nearly as absurd as it appears. Serafinowicz may not be aware of the deliciously unsophisticated Australian gambling game 2-Up, which makes craps look like poker, but I suspect he may want to investigate.

TV Scoop Review

This one I really *wanted* to be good. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. While there were some laughs to be had, it has to be admitted that it was bit of a let down.

Aerial Telly Review

With depressing consistency, the sketches commit the cardinal sin of revealing the punchline in the first few seconds of the sketch and then spend the rest of the sketch labouring over the now redundant set-up.

There were moments of fatigue in what can best be described as the spasmodically enjoyable The Peter Serafinowicz Show. I thought the trails for the series announcing 'We've always known he's a comic genius - now you can discover him too' invited inevitable disappointment. And predictably Serafinowicz - a familiar, much admired face from the likes of How Do You Want Me?, Black Books and Look Around You - didn't entirely live up to such lofty claims.

That said, he did plenty to justify having a show of his own. His style was rapid-fire, a blizzard of 30-second sketches in The Fast Show manner, and the mood was decidedly madcap. Nearly all his material spoofed other TV shows and adverts and, though some of the material felt very dated, his skills as an actor and mimic enabled him to get away with it for the most part - just.

I especially liked his quickfire, simple skits on hair and cleaning products. ('Toilet Grenade - bang and the germs are gone!' - as was the toilet.) In fact, the sillier Serafinowicz got, the funnier he was. Overall, the sense was of a talent finding his feet, enjoying himself enormously but at times playing it too safe for his own good.

It's totally bonkers, the product of a strange mind. It's also very funny - much, much funnier than Vivienne Vyle. Simple pastiche is not enough to get a laugh these days, you have to take it to a whole different place. And you have to be a bit mad too, which Serafinowicz clearly is.

A lot of it is not so successful - the Big Brother house full of clones that is frequently returned to, for example, is just tedious. But this is a sketch show, the format for which the phrase 'hit and miss' was invented.

Actually, I'm not convinced that there's a lot of life left in the sketch-show format. Mitchell and Webb did their best to kill it off. But Peter Serafinowicz, with his wacky take on the world, may just have raked up a few dying embers. Maybe next time he'll do something else.

We don't tend to do five syllable English surnames, let alone stick names that long in the title of brand-new comedy shows. All power then to Peter Serafinowicz's (Polish) ethnic elbow for managing to get his name in lights for what promises to be a reliably entertaining series of sketch comedy.

As a tried and tested impressionist, Serafinowicz will be impersonating such stars as Al Pacino and Simon Cowell - while introducing a crop of characters from incompetent private detective Brian Butterfield to Michael-6, robot chat show host.