Sharon Horgan

Though Free Agents is a droll and very winning romantic comedy, don't expect soft-focus hearts and flowers. Yes, it's sweet and poignant, but it's also frequently filthy - imagine Richard Curtis doing dirty. The pairing of Stephen Mangan and Sharon Horgan as its emotionally stunted leads - talent agents Alex and Helen - is an inspired one. He's sad and embittered after a messy divorce and misses his children; she binge-drinks to blot out her obsession with her dead fiancee. They have a disastrous date where he cries after sex, then face the crippling embarrassment of having to work together, day in, day out. This possibly sounds gruesome, but it's not; Free Agents (you might recall its 2007 pilot) is a deliciously skewed romance that's adult, modern and funny. And Mangan and Horgan are appealing as two lost and damaged souls in search of happiness.

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.

Free Agents - I'll make you a star

Channel 4's caustic new comedy series follows the tumultuous work and love lives of three showbiz agents. The Independent meets the show's cast-iron talent.

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...

Free Agents is a new romantic comedy series, 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 fiancé 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 pours a 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.

Free spirit for new comedy

In a modern office building towering above Euston station, Stephen Mangan, Anthony Head and Sharon Horgan have been hard at work on a new Channel 4 comedy.

Sharon Horgan - gorgeous, talented and funny

Horgan, 38, is gorgeous, talented and funny. She started writing comedy only six years ago, after leaving Ireland for London in her late teens, attending second-rate acting schools, doing an awful lot of waitressing and, in her late twenties, going to Brunel University to study English.

Feature: Free Agents

As if today's celebrities weren't rude enough, here's a sitcom about their even ruder agents. The Telegraph visits the set of Channel 4's new comedy series Free Agents and meets cast members Sharon Horgan, Stephen Mangan and Anthony Head.

Shut those workmen up!

It takes an army of people just to make a few seconds of TV. Who are they - and what do they all do? The Guardian follows Channel 4's all-star new comedy from shoot to screen.