Ricky Gervais

Nurse was one of the radio comedies upgraded with moving pictures. Esther Coles was terrific as Liz, a careworn Community Psychiatric Nurse administering salutary chats and sedatives to a whole host of comic grotesques.

The grotesques were all played by Paul Whitehouse, as they seemingly always are. Whitehouse has been shapeshifting outrageously for many years, first in The Fast Show, then in 2005's Help (a similar endeavour where he played each of a psychiatrist's 20 or so patients), but most recently in a series of adverts for car insurance. This has had the unfortunate effect of making what should be virtuoso appear merely so-so. In Nurse his transformations were a distraction from what was a rather wonderful study of those who need help and those who give it.

Small strands of Liz's home life were dotted around the periphery - an ex-husband, a teenage son, both at the other end of the phone - suggesting that this was a series with legs. Take out the Whitehouse showboating and you had something both funny and poignant. So much recent TV comedy seems to have become very, very sad - Nurse was similar in timbre to Getting On (set in a hospital geriatric ward) or Ricky Gervais's Derek (set in a nursing home). All a world away from the karaoke catchphrase comedies of the Nineties where kids would be trilling 'Suits you sir,' the next day. Comedy has become essentially non comic.

Is new comedy 'Nurse' too sugary sweet?

The jokes have been made already ('Goodness, this is a long Aviva car insurance advert') and the comparisons to Ricky Gervais' Derek have been posted well in advance. And it's true that Paul Whitehouse's bittersweet new sitcom for BBC Two, about a hard-pressed Community Psychiatric Nurse, does bear an unfortunate and uncanny resemblance to both. But here's the rub - the Aviva adverts are funnier. And it's so soppy that it makes Derek look like a Michael Haneke film.

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Ricky Gervais acting classes just keep getting better

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Ricky Gervais may attend Golden Globes dressed as Derek

Derek hugs on the red carpet? Yes, that could happen.

Gervais reveals there's an "even better" Derek special

Netflix viewers will see an extended version of the final moments at Broad Hill Nursing Home, as Ricky Gervais's thoughts turn to Life on the Road and Special Correspondents.

There are people who defend this mockumentary to the death, egged on by Ricky Gervais on his Twitter account, but it doesn't wash with me. It has amusing moments, but the show's always at its best when Gervais's insufferable Derek Noakes is off-screen. Lord knows why this performance earns Golden Globe nominations in the U.S, because it's a cringe-worthy mix of tic's and cartoonish body language. Derek's finale revolved around the wedding of saintly nursing home worker Hannah (Kerry Godliman) to her underwritten bin man boyfriend, which intersected with the expulsion of gross Kev (David Earl). Wisely, Derek's actual role was largely limited to a fairly sweet date with an unconvincingly adoring woman. One gets the sense Gervais, deep down, knows the multitude of ways this show and his character is flawed (he's not an idiot), but despite the fact the finale's a big improvement from the show's first series, it could never overcome the awkward mix of lowbrow gags and unearned sentimentality.

Derek, review, final episode: 'glib and manipulative'

The feel-good aura in Ricky Gervais's comedy drama verged on claustrophobic and was laced with irony.

Ricky Gervais's inexplicably clunky "thing" about a kind man who works in a nursing home. I can find no comedy in it and it lacks the emotional truth required for a drama. It concluded last night with a 65-minute special featuring a wedding, a baby, an anecdote about a bird with a broken wing and an alcoholic's redemption, all laced with Gervais's emotion-flavoured dialogue that sounds as if it should spring from real feelings but doesn't.

Everyone looked embarrassed except Colin Hoult, one of the few good things in the last ever episode as Jeff, a self-contained side character, criminally underused. On the strength of his two or three lines, you could sense a whole life going on under the surface. It wasn't in the lines but the performance, both understated and totally eye-grabbing. I'd like to see a show called Jeff, but written by someone with less of a tin ear for sentiment.