Sharon Horgan

Mangling accents and genres with glee, Bad Sugar is one of the more promising pilots of C4's Funny Fortnight. Starring three-headed comedy hydra Julia Davis, Sharon Horgan and Olivia Colman, it's equal parts telenovela, costume drama and pseudo-glossy, 'Dallas'-style family saga. The plotting - centred around the will of an ageing patriarch (David Bradley) and the scheming of his three children (plus Horgan's cuckoo in the nest, Lucy) - is self-consciously ridiculous. But Bad Sugar is sustained by a host of brilliant performances. In addition to the above, look out for Kayvan Novak (dim gardener Simon) and Peter Serafinowicz (closeted son Rolf). Tonight, the fingers of Colman's piano-playing naif Joan are mangled by a red-hot boule ball; the absurdity can only escalate when a full series airs next year.

Julia Davis stars alongside Olivia Colman and Sharon Horgan in a spoof of Latin American telenovelas from Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. Sending up a genre that's already a send-up of itself is a tough ask, but they pull it off.

Comedy fans, prepare to be excited. This new pilot has impeccable pedigree, being written by Peep Show's Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and starring three of our funniest actresses: Olivia Colman (Rev.), Julia Davis (Nighty Night) and Sharon Horgan (Pulling). It's a soapy spoof melodrama - think Dallas done by French and Saunders - about a rich, dysfunctional mining dynasty. Cue face-slapping, bitching and deliberately clumsy exposition.

Olivia Colman: 'I like that she's not quite right'

Olivia Colman teams up with Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan for Bad Sugar, a wickedly funny new black comedy about a dysfunctional mining dynasty from the writers of Peep Show.

Interview: Dead Boss co-creator Holly Walsh

BBC3's Dead Boss sees Holly Walsh move behind the camera on a show she co-writes with Sharon Horgan. Keen to find out more about the show, Giggle Beats caught up with an exhausted Holly Walsh to find out if everything had gone according to plan...

The central conceit was that a succession of famous women from history subject themselves to the enquiries of a shrink, played with cooing aplomb by Rebecca Front. Joan of Arc is shown to be a petulant teen in a breastplate who justifies herself by saying "God made me do it", Eva Braun lists the virtues of her new boyfriend ("When he walks into a room, everyone really respects him") before confiding, "He might be a bit of a racist", and Beatrix Potter reveals that animals tell her mucky stories.

I laughed immoderately at Sharon Horgan's portrayal of Frida Kahlo with a long droopy moustache, blithely ignoring the shrink's subtle enquiries ("Is it possible that you've ... cultivated something that might be keeping him at arm's length?") and at Sheila Reid doing Mother Teresa as a chain-smoking Northern harridan. But the humour relied tiresomely on the juxtaposition of primness and smut, on Jane Austen and blowjobs, the Bible and bonking. In one sketch, Mary Whitehouse reveals a liking for gay porn. Mary Whitehouse? Which decade are we in now?

At times I wished the women had been invited to improvise. They might have brought some welcome diversion from the writers' one-track minds.

Helen Stephens, falsely imprisoned for murder, is forced to share her cell with a German cannibal on a prisoner-exchange. Played by the splendid Anna Crilly (of Lead Balloon), even she can't rise above the jokey German accents and weak gags in this curious misfire from Sharon Horgan.

There are good moments, just not enough. In this third episode they belong to Edward Hogg as Henry, a workmate with an unfortunate centre parting who is secretly obsessed by Helen. He can't quite keep a lid on his feelings during a prison visit, telling his beloved that her shampoo makes her "smell like the inside of a taxi".

Good ol' Sharon Horgan. She so rarely puts a foot wrong that it's a wonder she isn't representing Great Britain in the Olympics balance beam event. Nothing changes as we reach the third episode of Dead Boss, where she continues to ring up the laughs with a performance alternates between flustered, histrionic and deadpan. Tonight, Horgan's character, Helen, is lumbered with a new cellmate as part of a prison exchange with Germany: Gertrude (Anna Crilly), 'a 46-year-old widowed cannibal'. Helen's charged with the task of going to 'show her where she can get a souvenir tattoo done - that sort of thing' by the warden. Helen can't fail unless she wants her legal aid application quashed. Sounds hackneyed. Actually, it's anything but. Very funny.

'Wearing rollerblades to my father's funeral. My reggae phase. Going to Butlin's and sucking off that redcoat...' These, in case you were wondering, are among the many regrets of Edith Piaf. They give a good flavour of Psychobitches, this 'Playhouse' closer which imagines the musings of (in)famous female figures on the psychiatrist's couch. Mary Whitehouse is obsessed with Tom of Finland, Mother Theresa smokes, swears and gives of an air of simmering menace and Eva Braun is walking on air after meeting a new fella ('he's really going places'). The targets are soft and many of the gags verge on the obvious. But it's brought gleefully to life by another superb cast which includes Sharon Horgan, Rebecca Front, Sam Spiro and Catherine Tate. Not big or clever, but its unapologetic silliness carries the day.

Confession time. I didn't review Dead Boss (BBC3) when it began last week. Here's why. I'm a big fan of Sharon Horgan, who co-wrote and stars in it. Pulling, which she also co-wrote and starred in, was fabulous, one of my comedy highlights of recent times. But this was pretty lame - and tame - in comparison. I wanted to like it, but couldn't.

So I ignored it. Perhaps it needed time to bed in (pah!), and would get into its stride in week two. I told myself I was giving it a chance by deferring judgment, when of course I was really simply bottling it.

This episode is maybe a bit better. There are some nice lines: "Mia casa, tua casa, is that German, erm, mein Kampf is your Kampf?" Horgan's character Helen tells her new prison exchange cellmate Gertie (played by Anna Crilly, whose German accent is pretty much the same as the indeterminate eastern European one she has as Magda in Lead Balloon). And some nice performances (Emma Pierson's stands out, as the dead boss's widow). But, let's be honest, it's not good - neither wonderfully anarchic nor wonderfully rude, as Pulling was. It lacks that conviction and confidence. It's old-fashioned, unadventurous and, more serious still, unfunny.

Oh God, my confession gets worse, it was a bigger bottle even than that. Sharon Horgan follows me on Twitter. I was like an excited little boy when she did, given that I don't just follow her, I practically stalk her. Now I'm like someone who's pestered her forever for a kiss, she's finally relented (out of pity), and I'm running around saying her breath stinks. Let's face it though; it does. Not literally, but her sitcom does.

I say she follows me, I'm sure she doesn't any more. Oh well. Nothing - and no one - comes between me and critical integrity ... Yeah, shush now.