Sarah Alexander

Dippy Gemma's (Sarah Alexander) complicated private life continues to traumatise her in this family sitcom, as she swoons over teenager Billy (Robert Sheehan) - who's "like catnip to the ladies". Alfie, Gemma's son, has invited her to a party, causing his mother to worry that she's looking too "Boy George" in her get-up. Meanwhile Jason's (Neil Morrissey) sensuous Swedish girlfriend Inca - brimming with "angry sexuality" - is trying to cajole him into dance lessons.

If Me and Mrs Jones, this crummy yummy mummy sitcom doesn't in itself herald the end of the universe, it does make you question what 14bn years of cosmic existence has achieved.

After the desperate opener, the humane hope was that, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics, things could only get better. But the second episode proved that hope to be vainer than Simon Cowell.

Character may not always be destiny in real life, but it is in real comedy. And like far too many British comedies, Me and Mrs Jones, a school gate farce, has no characters. Instead it has "types": the hapless single mother, the neighbourhood busybody, the humourless Nordic sex bomb.

To watch Sarah Alexander as Mrs Jones work herself into a mirthless fluster is to long to see Wendy Craig in a rerun of Carla Lane's 70s sitcom Butterflies, a yearning I have never previously felt in danger of experiencing. Yet say what you will about Craig's Ria, she was drawn from an active imagination rather than an exhausted comic trope.

The stock ciphers in Me and Mrs Jones possess no animating truth and therefore inspire no sympathy - the paradox of comedy being that you have to feel for people before you can laugh at them. Whatever pity was mustered went on the actors, whose lines were so limp that it seemed like a cruel and unusual punishment to leave them dangling without the protection of a laughter track.

In historical terms, the demise of the laughter track must be hailed as a positive development in British sitcom. For is there not something creepily controlling about being prompted to laugh? Apart from anything else, it denies us the basic human right of spontaneity.

But with the sort of sitcoms that British television churns out with mystifying regularity, the laughter track performs a vital practical role. It provides the only sign that these shows are comedies. Take that away and you're left with an extreme version of Brechtian alienation, only without the intellectual kudos.

When, for example, Inca the Nordic sex bomb said: "I am Swedish", you could detect immediately afterwards a ghostly appeal to a notional sense of humour - the empty beat where the laughter was supposed to go. Call it the silence of comic entropy, this was the haunted sound of a joke that had not just died but decomposed into absolute nothingness.

Sarah Alexander: My character isn't a cougar at all

Sarah Alexander talks about her new show Me And Mrs Jones, relationships with big age gaps and why she liked doing Tommy Cooper impersonations as a child.

Gemma, the titular Mrs Jones (Coupling's Sarah Alexander), edges further towards an intergenerational clinch with new lodger and her son's friend from travelling, Billy, the dreamy Robert Sheehan from Misfits. Of course, things couldn't go to plan - and a dustup ensues at a school play, doing little to temper Gemma's perpetual state of flustered embarrassment. The only effective way to distinguish whether Me And Mrs Jones is supposed to be a comedy or not would be to add a laugh track as a rough guide. There are few clues otherwise in this mirthless dreck.

Meanwhile on BBC One another family based sitcom had just begun, and while this series should be a hit, for some reason it feels a little... drab.

Me and Mrs Jones revolves around divorced mother of three Gemma Jones (Sarah Alexander), who is trying to raise two daughters, while her son has just returned from China to 'find himself'. Gemma not only work and family issues, but also has to deal with her ex-husband Jason (Neil Morrissey), who's now going out with a younger Swedish lady.

In terms of the cast, it looks great. The writers, Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, worked with Alexander on Smack the Pony and later on one of my favourite shows, Green Wing. And Alexander as well as Morrissey are both established sitcom actors. But I just didn't find this show very funny.

Don't get me wrong, there are some laughs, such as the scene when Morrissey is at a children's football match and celebrates one of his daughters scoring a goal - unaware his face is covered in lipstick. However, most of it felt flat.

It could the fact that I'm familiar with their past work; I was expecting something more surreal and unusual from the writers. Not only was this not surreal enough, it wasn't as grounded in reality as either Friday Night Dinner, which also features a Green Wing actress in the form of Tamsin Greig, or the forthcoming Hebburn.

The show also featured the two daughters vomiting a lot, which was slightly off-putting. Personally, I feel that vomit and 'sick humour' are best applied under the "Elizabeth Mainwaring" rule - it's much funnier when it isn't shown, because the image in your head is much better than the one on screen.

Then again, it could just be that this episode had to follow perhaps the most awkward and unfunny episode of Have I Got News for You there's been in years. So in hindsight, Me and Mrs Jones probably deserves a second chance. Another viewing after a more joyful atmosphere may improve the output. At least I hope so.

Me and Mrs Jones opens with a goldfish in a toilet bowl. I can only guess that the goldfish took one look at the script and attempted to escape before his television career suffered irreparable damage.

Of the many unkind epithets suggested by Roget's Thesaurus, 'excruciating' is the one that best describes this show. Until I watched it, I did not realise it was physically possible to grit one's teeth, curl one's toes and clench one's sphincter all at the same time. And stay that way for half an hour.

Purportedly a romantic comedy, it is about as light and fluffy as a breeze block. Not the most sparkling of analogies, I grant you, but better than anything the lazy and witless script of Me and Mrs Jones had to offer.

"Houdini would have trouble getting out of this dress," grumbles our scatty, sexy heroine Gemma, as she writhes around in a store changing room. Houdini? The escapologist who died 88 years ago? Watch out for further thrillingly contemporary references to the general strike, Irish home rule, speakeasies and the disappearance of Amy Johnson.

Where the show strives to charm, it succeeds in irritating. I am a fan of Sarah Alexander, who plays Gemma, but here I found her wackiness so mannered as to be unbearable.

But the worst thing about Me and Mrs Jones is that no part of it rings true - not the characters, not the relationships and definitely not the dialogue. Romantic comedy needs to appear effortless, but every minute of this contrived, constipated monstrosity screams with the strain of it all.

A solidly dependable cast, including Nathaniel Parker and sitcom stalwart Neil Morrissey, tries so desperately hard to unearth humour from the barren comic landscape that I actually began to pity them. This is particularly true of Jonathan Bailey, lumbered with the Herculean and ultimately futile task of lending sympathy to Alfie, Mrs Jones' unremittingly loathsome eldest son, just back from his gap year abroad. Apart from a big mouth, an overinflated ego and a penchant for harassing women on public transport, Alfie also has a best mate in tow, who just might hit it off with his mum over the next five episodes.

This surprisingly standard-issue sitcom from the Green Wing team stars Sarah Alexander (Coupling) as Gemma Jones, divorced from Jason (Neil Morrissey) and juggling maternal duties with an attempt to kick-start her love life. It's the candidates jockeying for boyfriend position who provide the thrust of the action, with safe choice Tom (Nathaniel Parker) vying for pole position with toy boy Billy (Robert Sheehan).

This new comedy has such an impressive pedigree (it's written by Green Wing's Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, and has a pretty strong cast list) that it's almost inevitable that the first episode will disappoint. But give it a chance because it could be a grower, especially among fans of suburban comedies such as the now defunct My Family and Outnumbered.

Sarah Alexander is perfect as the eponymous Mrs Jones, a scatty divorcee with a very modern family life (for which read complicated and messy). Swilling about in the mix of well-intentioned friends and school-age daughters she's got an ex-husband (Neil Morrissey), a grown-up son who returns from his gap year travels with an attractive friend in tow (Misfits' Robert Sheehan) and a handsome admirer (Nathaniel Parker) who the yummy mummies in the playground all fawn over. By the end of the episode she's snogged a man she barely knows and dragged a half-naked one into her bathroom. So which is the "Me" of the title?

The peerless US sitcom Seinfeld was sometimes lovingly referred to as 'a show about nothing'. It was a comment that perhaps said less about the show itself than the ranks of contrived, over-cooked sitcoms of the time - the likes of Doogie Howser, M.D. and My Two Dads. It's a credo that the BBC would seem to have adopted wholesale for this baffling new six-part sitcom about the daily trials of a divorced Crouch End yummy-mummy. Sarah Alexander plays Mrs Jones, an unnecessarily flustered whirl of wasted energy and noisy self-involvement. She has three children. That's it. That's your situation. The humour is similarly truant, with garbled, nervous chatter and aimless jibes about Nigella and Range Rovers filling in for yer actual barbs and zingers. No sit. No com. No sale.

Sarah Alexander on her favourite TV

The Me And Mrs Jones actor on her viewing habits, from Breaking Bad to Peanuts.