Simon Bird (I)

Simon Bird: The Inbetweeners movie felt like a holiday

"The funniest stuff happens when you're as relaxed as you possible can be with a camera in your face. So to sum up, I'm entirely unprofessional"

It broke UK box-office records for the most successful opening weekend ever for a comedy - not bad for a film based on an E4 sitcom - and has posh Will (Simon Bird), sex-obsessed Jay (James Buckley), dim Neil (Blake Harrison) and just-dumped Simon (Joe Thomas) finally leaving Rudge Park Comprehensive for a post- A-levels jaunt to Crete.

Gags about sex, vomit and hand shandies are all present and correct as our anti-heroes struggle with the challenges of being abroad and meeting girls. Think the English version of American Pie.

Winner of the 2009 Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, Jonny Sweet is a young talent to look out for. He might be familiar from Sky1's comedy series Chickens, penned by Sweet with his co-stars Joe Thomas and Simon Bird, (the stars of The Inbetweeners, Fresh Meat and Friday Night Dinner).

There is an essence of all of these comedies about Hard to Tell, with the emphasis on the younger characters' trials and tribulations, but I think it's a grower. This episode involves Valentine's Day plans that one knows are doomed as soon as we learn that they involve borrowing the prized touring van of a girlfriend's father...

The teen heroes of the hit E4 series to make it to the big screen in this remarkably well-received TV spin-off. Here a recently dumped Simon (Joe Thomas) and his mates Will (Simon Bird), Neil (Blake Harrison) and Jay (James Buckley) jet off for a jolly holiday to Malia, seeking 'sun, sand, sex, sea and sex'. Obviously they find sunburn, sexual humiliation and a high rate of poo/vomit/ masturbation-based humour instead. Packed with laughs, this broke records to become the most successful British opening weekend for a comedy film ever, grossing more than £2.5million on its first day of release. None too shabby for a supposed bunch of losers, eh?

It's so slight it's in danger of drifting away on the lightest breeze. But in a year when the best TV has generally ranged between solemn and devastating, it feels good to have something as blithe, breezy and just plain daft as Chickens to provide some light relief. This is one of those TV experiences which manages to be enjoyable without leaving any real mark on your memory whatsoever. To see it is to forget it.

Tonight, the chickens' water has gone brown. But they aren't practical types and, with Rittle-on-Sea's menfolk off at the front, there is every prospect of this hardship continuing. Elsewhere George is going to have to relax his principles and cane a miscreant schoolboy if he wants to stay engaged. But might he get a taste for it? Simon Bird, Joe Thomas and Jonny Sweet share an enviable comic chemistry; this more than anything is the key to Chickens transient charms.

Radio Times review

There's a touch of Carry On to Bert, the sniggering womaniser played with much zeal by Jonny Sweet. Yet his gags often feel the freshest in this First World War comedy because Simon Bird and Joe Thomas are playing characters almost identical to those they're famous for in The Inbetweeners: a goody-goody and an ill-starred romantic.

In this second episode, Bert makes eyes at a widow, Cecil has his knickers in a twist about plumbing and schoolmaster George's pacifism lands him detention. Look out for Barry Humphries (better known as his alter ego Dame Edna Everage) as a conniving headmaster.

Is everyone who took part in the First World War dead? Good, let's desecrate their sufferings and sacrifices with a rubbish sitcom.

I was really looking forward to Chickens, Sky1's take on British conscientious objectors during the Great War. It sounded a bold, brave and original concept that promised to push the world of Blackadder Goes Forth to a further level of dark, dangerous, edgy and disturbing satire.

How could it fail to do otherwise, with protagonists who would have permanently existed in the shadow of public contempt, scorn and opprobrium?

How? By draining the situation of all drama and jeopardy, and reducing it to the level of a silly-ass costume comedy, that's how. For a show such as Chickens to work, it has to be grounded in some sort of emotional truth. But this has none. It just staggers from one contrived and supposedly surreal set-up to the next, completely missing the point that the First World War was itself a massive and bloody absurdity.

Chickens is written by its three stars - Simon Bird, Joe Thomas and Jonny Sweet - who therefore have nobody to blame but themselves for the paper-thin characters they're obliged to inhabit. Flat feet, moral repugnance and total imbecility preclude the trio from serving king and country, and consequently they are the only men in a village of women. Imagine a kind of Carry On Conshie, but without the film series' wit.

The show is shot through with anachronisms, not least its jazz-era theme tune, which aspire to be postmodern but actually betray a slovenly unwillingness genuinely to explore the period chosen as its setting.

There is also an awful lot of swearing, which invariably signals a paucity of decent jokes. Have I mentioned that Chickens isn't particularly funny, either?

Much was made in promoting the first episode of new Sky1 sitcom Chickens of the fact that Channel 4 had had first refusal on the series and, well, refused it. C4 must reject tons of comedies, but few of those mark the writing debut of the stars of not one, but three successful shows. Joe Thomas and Simon Bird, both of The Inbetweeners and then, respectively, Fresh Meat and Friday Night Dinner, seem quite chirpy about the initial setback, putting it down to their ubiquity in the Channel 4's comedy stable. That could be one reason, but another is that Chickens is just a little bit weak.

Here the pair have joined forces with old Cambridge uni pal, actor and stand-up Jonny Sweet. As well as writing, they all star in this First World War sitcom, which imagines the fates of three young men who escape conscription to stay at home in a village populated only by decidedly contemptuous women. Thomas is hen-pecked George, a conscientious objector whose fiancée forces him to help her draft flirty missives to her soldier penpals, while Bird plays pompous Cecil, supposedly rejected on physical grounds ("flat feet"). Sweet is nice-but-dim Bert, who keeps forgetting who the war is against and seems to have got out of it thanks to straight-forward cowardice. In this ineffectual trio of bickering frenemies there are strains of The Inbetweeners, but with some Mumford and Sons vintage styling. The tweed and twiddly moustaches suggests they were inspired by the recent vogue for all things chap-ish that peaked a while back and now looks dated rather than retro.

All three are as likeable as you'd expect based on their previous turns and they have a natural, punchy dynamic. Bird and Thomas do a great line in resignation to humiliation and Sweet is the right side of Pimms o'clock caricature. I liked the anachronistic touches - while Cecil is press-ganged by the local women into darning socks for the front, Bert embroiders a handkerchief with "Cecil, Bert and George - Takin' it easy 1914". The hanky ends up in a predictable set piece though, and what's missing, perhaps - especially since the trio say Sky offered them free rein - are a few darker or more surreal notes in all the frivolity. Barry Humphries is slated to appear in the next episode and I'm nursing the hope that, given time, Chickens might develop a bit more gutsily.

Review: Chickens

Simon Bird, Jonny Sweet and Joe Thomas spread their comedy wings in WWI sitcom.

I watched Chickens without prejudice, without knowing, as I do now, that Channel 4 declined to take the series after screening a pilot a couple of years ago (Sky stepped in). I watched as a fan of The Inbetweeners and its stars, Simon Bird and Joe Thomas, who joined fellow Cambridge Footlights man Jonny Sweet for this new sitcom. I wanted to like it, but, Christ, it was tough.

The trio put on posh accents, but, incongruously, their own familiar voices to play chaps who stay behind during the First World War (Bird's character has flat feet, Thomas's is a pacifist, and the other one is too thick to know there's a war on). They try to go about their business while being ridiculed and vilified by the women of their village. That's it. It is at best, I say with regret, a Footlights sketch on a bad week.