Sam Bain

Babylon, a new series by Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, has no shortage of coppers, as it's set in New Scotland Yard. But it's not by any means a crime procedural.

Instead, the pilot, directed by Danny Boyle, focused on the press office, where a new American boss (Brit Marling) was attempting to establish her authority while a serial killer was on the loose. The fraught relationship between public relations and policing reality is promising territory for caustic treatment, but this suffered from cynical overload. Everyone appeared to be horrified by everyone else, with the characters either speaking in the sort of scathing comic lingo familiar from The Thick of It or in halting disbelief, as though no one could quite believe that everyone else was that cynical.

There were, as you'd expect, some funny lines. "You can't hold back time," one character complained. "You're not Michael J Fox or L'Oréal." But the tone veered all over the place from surreal comedy to dramatic suspense without every quite mastering one, let alone situating it alongside the rest.

You could call it ambitious - and it was - but as a pilot it was a bit of a mess. Still, there was more than enough to suggest that once it has settled in, some of those ambitions may yet be realised. "The problem with cops," said another character in what was a meta-comment on the police on TV, "is that they're cop types."

Radio Times review

Shambles, swearing and spin: if you've missed The Thick of It, you're in luck. Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong have applied the high-farce formula to the Metropolitan Police for this scabrous comedy drama directed by Danny Boyle.

Their Met, led by James Nesbitt as Commissioner, is obsessed with public image: top brass fret so much about media coverage that any actual policing comes a distant second. This gets ugly (and funny) in tonight's pilot, when a series of shootings breaks out across London on the day a new American PR chief (Brit Marling) arrives in the job. The script is sharp and cruel, though occasionally the delivery feels a little too delivered: throwaway realism is what's needed here. Roll on a full series.

Babylon, episode 1, Channel 4, review

While it had many strengths, Babylon was not quite as great as the sum of its parts and the problem lay in Danny Boyle's direction. He may be Britain's most-lauded director but his filter of coolness was at odds with the very British, rather dyspeptic dialogue of Sam Bain and Jessie Armstrong.

Babylon: Danny Boyle's return to TV

Danny Boyle has collaborated with Peep Show writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain on Babylon, an ambitious new cop show. Craig McLean went on location.

Next series of Peep Show will be the last... or will it?

Good news for Peep Show fans as Sam Bain, co-writer of the hit Channel 4 comedy, tells RadioTimes.com he will not kill off Jeremy and Mark.

Fresh Meat season 4 - what will happen next?

Sam Bain - the co-creator of the Channel 4 comedy - is hoping for another series, but what is next for JP, Vod, Kingsley and co?

Sam Bain on how to break into comedy

The comedy writer talks working with Danny Boyle, how to deal with failure and why the nation's celebrity obsession should end in therapy.

Channel 4's Fresh Meat has become part of the telly furniture. When that happens to a popular drama, the characters sometimes sit around on actual furniture and do little more than chat.

This can work, depending on the depth of our love for them, but now and again it turns out indulgent, if not disastrous - remember how badly This Life ended? Reconvening for a country house weekend, a favourite show expired through a combination of fierce hotel thermostat and crummy writing. Anyway, Fresh Meat returned for a third series with a lot of sitting around, though of course this is what students do all the time.

They loafed about in the flat, in the union bar - and best of all in Josie's digs in Southampton, where she'd transferred to forget about Kingsley. Only Kingsley was in bed with her and, discreetly, they were "doing it". Oregon was also in the bed because there was no room on the floor, so she said: "I'm having an involuntary threesome." JP was on the floor and he said: "Right, that's it, I'm having a wank." This idea caught on as Howard and Vod woke from their subsidised-beer stupors. "Let's have an orgy!" roared JP. "Come on, it's all been leading to this. Let's just throw ourselves into a sex pie!"

Puerile? Yes. Funny? That too. We know from Peep Show that writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain can do third, fourth, fifth series. These boys have staying power; much more than any course-hopping student fancying yet another gap year. And just because plum-coloured trousers have passed through their post-ironic phase, and just because lots of men who aren't posh wear them, and just because Made In Chelsea has given us real upper-class twits to laugh at, that doesn't mean that JP has outlived his comic usefulness.

He wasn't getting enough sex; in pie form or any kind. He decided: "I'm pulling out my privilege." To the host of the Southampton party, a traffic-lights party no less: "Would you kindly announce to your flatmates that a man with a Coutts Gold Card is in the house!" To a girl he fancied: "I could take you to a place on the Kings Road where Prince Harry got a handjob off an assistant manager of Abercrombie & Fitch." To Howard who, incredibly, secured a date with the girl he fancied: "I don't mean to be rude but she's a proper human being. You're the Pig Man of Arbroath." JP is a fabulous fool, played with utter conviction by Jack Whitehall.

In the latest series of Fresh Meat, Kingsley (Joe Thomas) says that whole weird thing, him and Josie, is "over like Dover". Actually, Josie has transferred to Southampton, but she's still a permanent presence in the Manchester student house via Skype on an iPad. And later they go down there, for a traffic light party.

There's seamen aplenty too - without the "a", I'm afraid. "I've got a sex engine and it runs on cum," says red-trousered JP (Jack Whitehall), all in a froth about the new batch of hotties. Since starting his TV acting career in Fresh Meat, he has pretty much become Mr Right Now. Quite rightly - he's hilarious.

It's sticky and smelly, spunky and puerile. There's not much in the way of story, so it has no right to work over an hour. But it does, somehow. Well, I do know how: by being very funny about the funniest - and most tragic - time (it also rings a bit true, amazingly). I think I can actually feel what a good time Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain had creating it. I know I'm having a good time watching.

It's series three of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's comedy, and its student sextet are now reaping the benefits of becoming worldly-wise second-years. For sex-starved posho JP and "pig man of Arbroath" Howard, this means taking over the dry-slope skiing society and inviting female freshers over to an ultimately disastrous hot-tub party. Meanwhile, Oregon and Vod return from backpacking in Mexico, the latter with a boyfriend in tow, and Josie starts afresh in Southampton. But can she resist the lure of Kingsley?