Sharon Horgan

Coming hot on the heels of Plus One, Free Agents is Channel 4's second Friday night homegrown comedy series that is fun to watch. And that has got to be some sort of record. The success of Free Agents is entirely down to the strange love story at its heart. "I need a stable environment in which to get better," says the Stephen Mangan character to the girlfriend who isn't his girlfriend (Sharon Horgan). "And if I stay in your stable environment, then we can get better together."

In tonight's episode, the pair head off to a funeral to try and steal the clients of a dead agent, like a couple of wounded sparrows pretending to be vultures.

The always excellent Sharon Horgan stars as the recently bereaved Helen, with Stephen Mangan as her colleague Alex, an acting agent who has just walked out on his young family. We pick up with them after their one-night stand together, and things aren't going too well. With the room to move that a series gives, this didn't try to cram too much in, so the variation in tone that affected the pilot didn't surface. Characters were introduced well and situations nicely set-up. Thankfully it hasn't lost the jet-black comedy that got it commissioned in the first place.

Free Agents, Channel 4's new Friday-night comedy, began with a bit of awkward post-coital conversation. Alex (played by Stephen Mangan) has just slept with his colleague Helen (played by Sharon Horgan). He doesn't regret it, she does (in a cheerful, maybe-back-for-seconds kind of way). That's the sit. The com comes from Chris Niel's salty, rueful script, which very nicely exploits the best features of its cast, and also creates a genuinely comic monster in the shape of Stephen, the boss of the talent agency where Alex and Helen work. Stephen (Anthony Head, shaking off the memory of those twee coffee ads and crushing its skull beneath his heel) is foul-mouthed, lubricious, misogynistic and amoral. And funny.

The first thing you notice about Free Agents is the script. Witty, clever, caustic, shocking and seriously scatological, it is very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that for much of Free Agents you don't notice anything else.

Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan star as colleagues at an actors' agency who share an ill-judged night of passion and awake having to deal with the professional and personal consequences. Anthony Head co-stars, and steals scenes, as their lascivious, seedy and sex-obsessed boss who offers them his own perverse brand of agony uncle advice.

Mangan and Horgan are both very fine actors, but seem forever at the service of the shows dialogue. It's a bit churlish to complain about an excess of brilliant one-liners, but the initially breathtaking effect does soon wear off, and it becomes something of an effort to keep up with. Hopefully future episodes will give the characters a little more room to develop, and Free Agents will realise its full potential. It is already 50% funnier that most other comedies, so it can afford to relax a little.

Tabloid targets C4 sitcom

The Sunday Express has decided that new Channel 4 comedy Free Agents could be "the foulest sitcom ever".

In a news story, the right-wing tabloid states that: "The content of the show is bound to offend viewers."

And, before waiting for any figures, decided that: "TV watchdog Ofcom is preparing for a wave of complaints over the shocking language."

The show, starring Anthony Head, Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan, included the word 'cunt' three times and 'fuck' 22 times in its first episode, which aired at 10pm on Friday.

'Free Agents' defend show's language

Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan have apparently justified the use of swearing in their new show Free Agents.

Free Agents is a new romantic comedyseries, wallowing in obscenity, about a dysfunctional couple failing to have an affair. Personally I enjoyed it a lot, although I probably wouldn't recommend it to my 84-year-old mother. The couple concerned are a divorced father-of-two (Stephen Mangan) and a work colleague (Sharon Horgan) whose fiance dropped dead at the age of 34.

The Mangan character is broke, homeless and about as sexually sophisticated as a 15-year-old born-again Christian, while his nongirlfriend is suffering from posttraumatic death disorder. They work together in an actors agency run by a cynical old goat (Anthony Head), out of whose mouth poursa stream of uncensored filth. It works because, deep beneath the brittle layer of self-conscious trendiness, it is an old-fashioned love story with its own perverse brand of charm.

Rude, but very funny in parts, this new comedy centres around Alex (Stephen Mangan) whose marriage has broken down. He's fallen into a relationship with co-worker Helen, played by Sharon Horgan, who still can't get over her dead ex. And their sex-crazed boss - Anthony Head - is a complete nightmare.

If you get deja vu at the sight of Stephen Mangan sobbing in bed, you either know him very well (in which case, lucky you) or, more likely, you've seen him doing it before, in the pilot that went out in November 2007.

Mangan and Pulling star Sharon Horgan return playing talent agents who though they are technically single come with phenomenal amounts of emotional baggage. He's divorced and desperately missing his kids and her fiance has recently died.

It's not the most promising premise for a sitcom, I'll grant you. What it sounds like is the formula for a not very good Hollywood weepie: In a World Where Love Has Died... Can Two Broken Hearts Become One? etc.

Still, we'll just have to make the best of these raw ingredients and a relationship based on expediency (he has nowhere else to sleep) rather than any great spiritual or physical attraction.

The main problem I had with the pilot was that their kinky foul-mouthed boss (played by Anthony Head, enjoying himself enormously) was given so much rope they might as well have shoved a satsuma in his mouth while they were at it.

He's been reined in slightly in the re-write, but it's the watchableness of the two leads that rises above any weaknesses in the script and makes this worth a second date, with Sharon Horgan's cool cynicism nicely balancing Stephen Mangan's weepy wetness. They make a great couple - on screen anyway.

New comedy starring Stephen Mangan as a talent agent who's smitten with his colleague. You could never trust an agent to give 100 per cent to a relationship - after all, they'd be looking to skim off between 12 and 20 per cent for themselves. Therefore, a romance between two of them will be less than committed, and showbiz agents Sharon Horgan and Stephen Mangan certainly have a stand-off affair in this new comedy. Mind you, Sharon's mourning and Stephen's divorce don't really help matters...