Ricky Gervais

In the third episode of Ricky Gervais's opinion-splitting, gentle comedy, Derek (Gervais) finds a baby bird which has fallen from a tree and tries to save its life. It's also date night for Tom (Brett Goldstein) and Hannah (standout performer, Kerry Godliman) - except she's forgotten about it. Expect a very tender denouement.

Ahead of the first episode of his latest C4 offering, Derek, Ricky Gervais claimed that releasing a new TV show was like 'landing in Normandy and feeling the bullets rain down'. Now, I'm not going to suggest Ricky has been spending a bit too much time in Hollywood, but does he seriously think he suffers for his art like World War II troops suffered on those beaches? It's all very worrying.

The only reason Derek isn't the most schmaltzy and emotionally manipulative programme I've ever seen is because Simon Cowell got there first. But then, Ricky has been displaying a siege mentality lately that would make even Sir Alex Ferguson blush.

For someone who professes not to care what people think, he's spending an awful lot of time on Twitter retweeting praise for Derek from starstruck followers who probably only tweeted in the first place in the hope that he would retweet it. Stranger still, Ricky and his showbiz chums have decided the 'knives are out' in the industry, particularly among the nation's TV critics. I've asked around and the general feedback is no such vendetta exists.

Sure, there is bemusement that Ricky appears to feel he has divine immunity from criticism - ironic really, given that when he's feeling in a particularly trolling mood Ricky likes to tell people God doesn't exist.

Most critics actually reacted fairly favourably to the pilot episode of Derek, which makes Ricky's decision to come out fighting now all the more baffling. Unless of course the bravado is a smokescreen to disguise the fact that a) Derek isn't really that controversial and b) the full series isn't really that good. It's by no means the worst programme I have ever seen.

There are some gentle laughs to be had. Kerry Godliman is superb as Hannah, the hybrid of Tim and Dawn from The Office, who runs the care home. And Karl Pilkington is fabulous at being Karl Pilkington in a bad wig as Dougie the caretaker. It is also refreshingly free of awkward celebrity cameos - although with Ricky's track record we can't rule out Michael Parkinson popping up in episode six trying to sell life insurance to the home's OAP residents.

Derek though takes schmaltz too far. It's basically a half-hour version of that pet charity campaign that featured a shaggy old dog shivering in the rain whimpering, 'Nobody wants you when you're old'. But instead of appealing for cash, Ricky is seeking credit. He'd love to be lauded for bravely tackling dangerous issues, when all he's really doing is throwing up a series of fairly obvious and nauseatingly sentimental crowd-pleasers with a side order of mawkish piano music.

No one is going to knock him for saying kindness is magic, or standing up for autistic people, or being nice about old people, or giving da yoof a second chance, or raging against busybody council bureaucrats. But he's hardly taxing himself - or us - here.

He's writing by bumper sticker. And while it might be magical for Ricky's ego if we were to continue to kindly avoid the massive elephant in that care home sitting room, I really can't bring myself to do it.

Because the simple fact is this. As well as being written by, performed by, directed by and edited by Ricky Gervais, Derek is also spoiled by him. His hammy performance as Derek Noakes is the biggest letdown of the entire show. Moreover, as a character, Derek is the least believable and least interesting thing in it.

If he didn't show up in the second series I don't think the show would suffer for it. I'd even go so far as to call any enforced absence a kindness.

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Channel 4 describes Ricky Gervais's story of a London nursing home as a comedy drama and it makes a uniquely strange mush out of the two genres. One minute it feels very much a sitcom, the next it turns into a soppy parable. The plot - too strong a word, really - involves a celebrity-obsessed teen who arrives at Broad Hill to do community service and is instantly repulsed by the elderly residents. But they win her over via manicures and gloopy music sequences. The dramatic message is so pat it's embarrassing.

Episode two of Ricky Gervais's odd little series and some characters feel indispensable.

Kerry Godliman who plays care home manager Hannah, is the beating heart of the piece - whether she's organising Derek's 50th birthday party or taking a teenage girl who's doing community service under her wing.

Other characters - notably Kev (David Earl) the sex addict with revolting personal habits who doesn't even live in the care home anyway - is what the fast forward button on your telly remote was made for.

Ricky Gervais is declining to play safe with his latest bittersweet comedy, if comedy is the right term. Comedy drama? I don't know. Perhaps there is a new genre here. Either way Derek (Wednesday, Channel 4) is about a man with learning difficulties who works in an old people's home. And you don't laugh at Derek, you laugh with him.

He may have a slack jaw and bad haircut but he is sympathetic and kind. In some ways he reminds me of the Peter Sellers character in Being There: the idiot savant who stumbles on profound truths, or at least says things which make you wonder a little (such as "Why aren't pigs called hamsters?").

As with The Office and Extras there are poignant moments. And there is pathos, too. The documentary style used in those earlier shows is also deployed here, with characters giving little one-to-one interviews away from the others. Hannah (Kerry Godliman) as the care worker running the home provides a necessary naturalistic balance to the grotesques around her.

Karl Pilkington plays a stroppy version of himself as the caretaker Dougie (in real life Pilkington has a deep suspicion of old people). And a new character has been introduced since the pilot last year: the sex-obsessed, trainwreck Kev (David Earl). Kev is Derek's friend, and as Hannah said: "If it weren't for Derek, Kev would have ended up dead in a skip."

When an accountant from the council came to inspect the home with a view to cutting its budget there were bound to be awkward moments - this was, after all, a comic device that echoed all the way back to the health inspector episode of Fawlty Towers - but I didn't see the Kev appearance coming. Bustled out of the way when the accountant arrived, he had taken his clothes off and gone for a "quick nap" in one of the beds while the elderly resident was still in the room.

In his stand up shows Gervais sometimes teases his audience about their nervousness at his politically incorrect jokes. It's OK, he implies, it is safe to laugh because I'm being postmodern and ironic. This territory is slightly less safe - laughing at the people laughing at Derek - but it is, nevertheless, still safe to laugh.

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If it's Ricky Gervais's curse to be judged against the success of The Office, I can't see his new comedy series, Derek, helping, being neither funny nor clever enough. Set in a retirement home and starring Gervais as a man with learning difficulties, it was a half-hour fight between caricatures of sentimentality and coarseness. I had hoped Gervais's performance as bobbing, gurning Derek might have become more nuanced since last year's pilot but it hadn't. Karl Pilkington fared well enough as the janitor but his bad wig spoke for the whole enterprise.

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