Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's second sitcom of the year is a more promising prospect than her first, the underpowered property-guardians comedy Crashing. Fleabag stars Waller-Bridge as a sexually, spiritually and career- confused twentysomething, who regularly breaks the fourth wall to divulge grisly details of one-night stands and other improprieties. On the face of it, she's not the most sympathetic of characters, but there's a deeper poignancy that reveals itself across this smart and sardonic series.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge interview

Here's what Phoebe had to say when I caught up with her for a chat...

Meet Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the British Lena Dunham

She's filthy-minded, desperate for connection and masturbates to Barack Obama while she watches the news ... BBC Three's new sitcom has a heroine who will chime with twentysomethings everywhere.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sitcom rewarded those who made it past a challenging premise (the protagonists live in a condemned hospital as property guardians) with dark LOLs as middle-class jobs met sub-student lifestyles, and Kathy Burke as you've never seen her before. The whole series is available to watch now on All4.

Episode two of the sitcom following a group of property guardians. Free-spirited Lulu (played by the show's creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge) continues to drive a wedge between Anthony and his fiancee. Not content with moving into the old hospital alongside them, she's soon working with Kate, and failing to get the hang of just about everything. Elsewhere, Melody homes in on Crying Colin. Despite a peculiar premise, this latest addition to the millennials-behaving-badly genre is yet to hit any kind of stride.

In many ways Crashing is like a traditional house share sitcom with plenty of mismatched characters having little in common other than the space they live in. However what separates Crashing from the plethora of past flatshare sitcoms is that the characters are all living as property guardians in a disused hospital. I did find the way that Phoebe Waller-Bridge introduced this concept was quite heavy-handed in some respects as the strait-laced Kate (Louise Ford) and obnoxious estate agent Sam (Jonathan Bailey) attempted to explain their situation in one of the opening scenes. Meanwhile Waller-Bridge's Lulu arrived at the hospital as an old friend of Kate's fiancée Anthony (Damian Molony) and was presented as a possible threat to their future together. Of the characters my initial favourite has to be the uninhibited French artist Melody (Julie Dray) whose one-liners provided some of the only highlights of this first episode. Rounding up the group were nervous diabetic Fred (Amit Shah) and Kate's recently divorced colleague Colin (Adrian Scarborough) who has already formed an odd bond with Melody. I did feel that Waller-Bridge was fighting somewhat of a losing battle with the first episode of Crashing primarily as she had so much plot to get through and so many characters to introduce. As the opening episode was only about twenty-three minutes long I don't think I really got to know any of the leads and therefore I wasn't as invested as I possibly should have been. That being said there were flashes of greatness layered within the patchy first episode as Waller-Bridge revealed the complexities that lay behind the seemingly annoying Sam and the highly strung Kate. I personally feel that Crashing deserved a longer amount of time for its opening instalment as it suffered from rushed storytelling and under-developed characters. I think that Waller-Bridge's script showed flashes of promise and that's why I'm going to give Crashing a second go however it feels that if her show had a longer running time then the characters and story would be given more room to breathe.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's monologue Fleabag, told by a free-wheeling, porn-obsessed woman, marked her out as one to watch when it debuted in 2013. Crashing is her first TV script: a flatshare sitcom with a fresh lick of grimy despair. Set in an old hospital, it follows a gaggle of property guardians as they navigate lives made more testing by their dilapidated discount digs - and, perhaps, the fact that many of them are the sort of flamboyantly affected sociopaths comedy commissioners can't seem to get enough of these days.

Generation rent finds its comic voice

Frustrated by the scarcity of meaty roles for women, Phoebe Waller-Bridge - 'the British Amy Schumer' - wrote and stars in Crashing, a new TV comedy for the way we live now.