Rhys Thomas

Eco-warriors are ripe for satire, and this zany mockumentary makes a decent fist of sending them up. Stephen Mangan and Rhys Thomas play two friends who want to help to save the world by becoming the first carbon-neutral, organic vegetarians to reach the Pole. It's funny in places but lacks direction.

The scourging of the Murdock empire is a goldmine of new material for comedians. The biggest audience guffaw in this returning series comes when interviewer Rhys Thomas asks his guest - fellow comedian Simon Day - if there really isn't anything that he wouldn't do for money. Day, fast as a whip, comes back with "Well, I wouldn't hack into people's phones." It's no secret that I love this series: it's akin to the empathetic questioning techniques of Kirsty Young or Victoria Derbyshire being channelled through Alexei Sayle or Steve Coogan - lots of insight, but even more laughs. Rhys does not push Day too closely on his addictive personality - something that the comic has been very open about in his recent autobiography - but we do get to hear about his spell in a borstal, which he refers to as being like "a violent boarding school".

Before we turn to the hellish mess that is Sirens, it's worth reminding ourselves what Channel 4 is meant to do. When the channel first went on air in 1982, its remit required it to provide a broad range of programmes which demonstrate innovation, experiment and creativity. A lot of ideals have disappeared down the plughole since then, and with them have gone most - perhaps all - of C4's reason to exist.

And so to Sirens, a new drama series about paramedics so devoid of innovation, experiment and creativity that my initial whimpers of disbelief had turned into a prolonged groan of despair by the first commercial break. Some flavour of its distinctive non-allure can be gained from the fact that the first words anyone spoke were, "Adrenalin, f---ing adrenalin."

In the speech that followed I counted six "f---s" - and it was a pretty short speech. Now, there's nothing new about having characters say "f---" every other sentence in a wearisome attempt to lend something a measure of street-cred, but I have never seen it done quite so lumpishly and self-consciously.

The main character, Stuart (Rhys Thomas), is a priapic moron with two mouthy sidekicks. Rather than characterise the sidekicks, writer Tony Basgallop had gone instead for a primitive sort of colour-coding - one is Asian while the other is gay. All three are so unpleasant that if they were the first people you saw after coming round from a heart attack, you might well summon up your last reserves of strength to try to knock yourself out again with the defibrillator paddle.

The first episode was called 'Up, Horny, Down'. This refers to the mood swings that apparently are a feature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - first you're exhilarated, then randy, then blue. Being possessed, I hope, of a reasonably compassionate nature - and also having no desire to recall any more of Sirens than necessary - I'll confine myself to noting that one scene involved Stuart trying to pee with an erection and splashing all the toiletries on his bathroom shelf. It went on in similar vein for 50 minutes and then, clearly aware that something climactic was required, loosed off a thrillingly bold "c---" just before the end credits.

It started life in 2003 as a blog by London ambulance technician Brian Kellett.

Back then, his musings on the job were entitled Random Acts of Reality. It became a book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, a radio play and now it's been turned into a TV series.

Even before it's aired here in Britain, an American version is already in the ­pipeline.

Written by Tony Basgallop, (Teachers, Hotel Babylon) this comedy drama is a strangely ­schizophrenic production.

On the one hand it seems to be straining to be a rude Channel 4 sitcom, filled with the usual quota of very bad language and sex scenes both gay and straight.

The opening line, "One female, mid-20s, looks like a slightly older Miley Cyrus...", played out against the medical drama cliche of slo-mo heroes and a lush ballad on the soundtrack, certainly leads you to expect the rest of the episode to be just as funny.

But it's also got a psychology ­textbook in its back pocket plus a brain and a conscience - three things that get in the way of comedy.

Our trio of paramedics, Stuart, Ashley and Rachid, played by Rhys Thomas, Richard Madden and Kayvan Novak, have attended a bad ­road-traffic accident and have been sent for counselling.

Warned of the mood swings that adrenaline coursing through their bodies will cause, Stuart decides to fight it - just to prove that he's more than a bunch of chemical reactions.

How much of tonight's first episode is based on real life is debatable, but it you want to wade through eight years of blogs to find out, then by all means, be my guest.

Sirens is a dire, dreary sitcom about three spectacularly charmless ambulance drivers.

Rhys Thomas of Bellamy's People and Fonejacker's Kayvan Novak are able comic performers, but they're all at sea in this virtually jokeless cauldron of mediocrity.

With its unedifying mix of crass sex jokes, gruesome imagery and ham-fisted "pathos", it's a tonal train-wreck. It's also stretched to breaking point at an hour, when its barren dialogue and slim plot (lazily derived from Seinfeld's infamous masturbation episode) couldn't sustain even half that time. If you're a young male who finds the very idea of turgidity amusing, knock yourself out. Otherwise, run for the hills.

Sirens looked promising on paper. Based on Tom Reynolds's popular blog, Random Acts of Reality, which wryly chronicled his time as an emergency response technician in the London Ambulance service, it stars three decent young actors - Rhys Thomas (from Bellamy's People), Kayvan Novak (Chris Morris's film Four Lions) and Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) - as cynical, laddish paramedics striving to treat their often harrowing work as just another day at the office. Unfortunately, it turns out to be one of those comedy-dramas that is neither funny nor dramatic. It combines Green Wing's irritating air of unreality with Skins's desperation to appear edgy, meaning that the banter just doesn't ring true, while the tediously frequent sexual encounters are even less believable.

Sirens cast interview

Rhys Thomas, Kayvan Novak and Richard Madden talk about filming Sirens...

Moving Down the Line (the creation of Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson) to TV sounded like such a bad and simply impossible idea, yet Bellamy's People - as the BBC2 spin-off series was called - worked superbly. "Nobody watched it," says Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) in this new run of the radio show. Bellamy is as strong a character as Alan Partridge for how perfectly he captures a certain type of radio presenter - and that failed TV show adds to the character. You'll now hear a Partridge-like mix of deliciously misplaced ego and barely hidden wounds. "I prefer radio," he insists. "I wanted to come back to my roots." So he's back with the "live" Radio 4 phone-in and while not every call works, the majority do, and it's a treat to have the show back again.

When this comedy series began it went out late. It still fooled gullible souls like me into thinking it really was a phone-in and not an exquisite parody of one. Host Gary Bellamy is played by Rhys Thomas, the voices of all those nutters, fanatics, drunks and po-faced poshies come from Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Amelia Bullmore, Simon Day, Lucy Montgomery and Felix Dexter. And very funny they are, probably because they are not a million miles away from the real people who call Radio 5 Live's real-life late-night hosts Tony Livesey and Stephen Nolan.

Rhys Thomas to star in Channel 4's Naked Apes

Comedy drama about Leeds-based paramedics to air this summer, as will new E4 series Beaver Falls.