Rhys Thomas

It's a quite funny idea - a spoof documentary with Stephen Mangan and Rhys Thomas as a pair of hapless British buddies walking to the north pole, carbon neutrally, to save the planet (and my lawn?). It's marginally more entertaining than watching Ben Fogle and the rowing dude doing this kind of thing for real. I like the rival team, a pair of gay Norwegians who split up as lovers but remain together as a polar exploring team, somewhere around 85 degrees north. And the shooting of a polar bear is fun. But there's too much filling between the laughs - it's really a sketch idea, dragged out to movie length.

Brian Tongue and Mark Bark-Jones, concerned about global warning and hoping to get a bit of Bono and Bob Geldof-style sainthood along the way, are making the world's first carbon neutral, vegetarian, organic expedition to the north pole. Stephen Mangan plays Bark-Jones as the ultimate eco bore, superior, self-pitying and ultimately likable; while Rhys Thomas's carefree Brian Tongue appears to be going along for the ride. The irreverent, comic tone is judged well - until the sentimental ending goes and ruins it all. Helen Baxendale makes a cameo as the sympathetic film-maker following the pair.

BBC Comedy Online: It's Pernweek!

Brian Pern, the ageing rock musician created by Rhys Thomas and played by Simon Day (both of whom you may recognise from The Fast Show and Bellamy's People), is returning for a new series this Friday.

Nobody watches BBC3 comedy pilots with total confidence, and with no preview DVD available, we haven't watched this one at all. But it has pedigree. Rhys Thomas, the straight-man star of Bellamy's People, writes and stars in a studio sitcom about police community support officers who want to be real cops, and who constantly derail investigations they shouldn't even be involved in. Years ago, Thomas had a minor cult hit with Fun at the Funeral Parlour - this sounds broader and more accessible. Look out for Denis Lawson as the chief constable.

Just how many characters do Whitehouse, Higson and co have up their sleeves? Last week saw this BBC2 comedy really hit its groove, with a theme of what makes Britain "great" bringing shape to largely improvised comedy. Whitehouse channelled Jon Gaunt for his rent-a-gob DJ and Higson introduced his testy history professor, both playing brilliant off Rhys Thomas' straight man. But the underrated Felix Dexter and Simon Day are this show's unsung heroes - the latter's Alan Bennettpesque poet's verse on "ethnic" cuisine was both laugh-out-loud funny and oddly poignant.

Not the best of the satirical run but bound to raise a wry smile or two. This week, we find Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) hitting the road to investigate what has happened to the United Kingdom's reputation for good manners.

Interviews with the usual Little Britain-ish characters culminate in a toe-curling ­showdown between Paul Whitehouse's England-shorts wearing painter and decorator Martin Hole - and an aggrieved traffic warden.

Bringing this Radio 4 comedy (it was then called Down the Line) to TV has cost it some of its mojo. That said, there are funny moments to savour. These include pub bore Chris Nibbs's (Charlie Higson) assertion that British greatness is epitomised by the ability to produce a fine custard cream. Also amusing is Simon Day's cockney villain threatening extreme violence if Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) looks him in the eye.

In the second episode of Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson's comedy, the fictitious Radio 4 talk-show host, Gary Bellamy (Rhys Thomas) has left the studio to meet some of his listeners, ostensibly to find out what it means to be British. In reality it's just a good excuse to showcase a terrific stream of comic performances, each of which is brilliantly observed. Tonight, there's a hotel-management student who reveres the land of Shakespeare and Jimmy Savile, a posh architect from the Cotswolds who happens to be black, a brigadier and colonel representing the face of the modern British Army ("We're primarily concerned with building bridges") and, best of all, a poet and national treasure from Yorkshire who seems remarkably familiar.

In taking this show from what started out as a radio parody show and putting it on TV, the essential element of humour seems to have been exsanguinated from it.

That's not to say that some of the actors didn't put in good performances, they did - notably an understated Rhys Thomas as Bellamy - but the show seems to have been too liberally daubed with tar from the same brush as Little Britain, and I have to say, that show didn't appeal to me either.

It's not that I'm lacking in the ability to be amused by the quirky, but when done often enough, quirky becomes clichéd. And I felt that most of the characters in Bellamy's People - though some were original in concept - became an embodiment of all that I suspect the writers, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, were trying to avoid.

The show seemed to want to seek out eccentricity and capitalise on it, and fair enough, if it had been a little less eccentric, might well have worked, but some were simply too 'eccentric' to be remotely believable. Take for example the sisters living together; one a fan of a Nazi regime, one a communist and n'er the twain shall meet without forced dialogue it would seem.

That said though, I did find the sweetly drippy Mr Khan character was fun; his call to get more Muslim shows on TV, such as Strictly No Dancing was amusing.

But to every silver lining there's a cloud and white van man was way too overdone, but arguably one of the more realistic characters. We've all met the type of course, but again, white van man has been done to death.

Overall, I guess there's a possibility that as it goes on, Bellamy's People might grow wings and fly, but though it's not a total dodo, it might well be on the verge of extinction unless it manages to attract that most sought after of comedy prefixes, 'cult'. If it does, it might live, but otherwise, I think this one could well be destined for a retrograde step back into its original habitat, and perhaps it should never have been taken from there in the first place.

In interviews promoting Bellamy's People, Paul Whitehouse has revealed the show is largely improvised and, as a result, the filming process involved hour upon hour of talking rubbish, which had to be painstakingly sifted through in order to extract the funny bits. You can only wish they'd looked a bit harder because if what got served up as episode one is a selection of the best bits then the reject pile must be truly mind-numbing.

Bellamy's People has been talked up as a successor to The Fast Show and the theory looked promising: a spin-off from a spoof late-night Radio 4 phone-in, the cameras followed 'award winning' radio monkey Gary Bellamy escaping the darkness of his studio and hitting the road to meet the voices at the other end of the phone.

Enter Whitehouse, long-time collaborator Charlie Higson and a motley crew of comedy veterans to have a ball as a selection of crazy characters. And there was the hitch: from the Essex fat bloke trapped in his room to the batty old posh chap ('Oh, I've brought you into the wrong room') to the East End tough-nut gangster, every one of these 'characters' turned out to be constructed from cardboard cut-out clichés. Which wouldn't matter too much if they were funny but, with the exception of a gag about bedside panthers from the zoologically confused Lion of Harlesden, Early D ('they're black lions!'), it all fell horribly flat. Floating through the middle of it all was Rhys Thomas as Bellamy, whose contribution amounted to various shades of bemusement. Understandable, perhaps, but a bit of banter might have spiced things up.

Maybe it was Whitehouse and Higson taking elaborate revenge on the younger generation of comedians they feel alienated from. 'I did you, I did you right up!' was the closest we came to a catchphrase, courtesy of gor-blimey builder Martin Hole. Thomas could be forgiven for thinking the line was aimed at him.