Ricky Gervais

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.

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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Like many, I've been disappointed with Ricky Gervais's comedy recently, but I'm going to stand up for him regarding Derek. I don't think that it ­exploits the mentally disabled and there are some sweet ­moments. It just isn't very funny.

Derek a little too full of self-congratulation

If you'd asked me, I wouldn't have brought Derek back for a series. To my mind, the pilot of Ricky Gervais's comedy about an assistant in a retirement home had already fully explored its awkward - and testing - balance of comedy and emotion.

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Ricky Gervais says Derek, his latest comedy creation, does not have a disability. But is this claim credible?

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Ricky Gervais' controversial comedy-drama Derek received an overwhelmingly positive response from viewers when it returned to Channel 4 for a full series.