Simon Cowell

Hill's X Factor musical: Cowell ends up loving himself

Simon Cowell is hoping to top the charts with a new song all about himself.

Ahead of the first episode of his latest C4 offering, Derek, Ricky Gervais claimed that releasing a new TV show was like 'landing in Normandy and feeling the bullets rain down'. Now, I'm not going to suggest Ricky has been spending a bit too much time in Hollywood, but does he seriously think he suffers for his art like World War II troops suffered on those beaches? It's all very worrying.

The only reason Derek isn't the most schmaltzy and emotionally manipulative programme I've ever seen is because Simon Cowell got there first. But then, Ricky has been displaying a siege mentality lately that would make even Sir Alex Ferguson blush.

For someone who professes not to care what people think, he's spending an awful lot of time on Twitter retweeting praise for Derek from starstruck followers who probably only tweeted in the first place in the hope that he would retweet it. Stranger still, Ricky and his showbiz chums have decided the 'knives are out' in the industry, particularly among the nation's TV critics. I've asked around and the general feedback is no such vendetta exists.

Sure, there is bemusement that Ricky appears to feel he has divine immunity from criticism - ironic really, given that when he's feeling in a particularly trolling mood Ricky likes to tell people God doesn't exist.

Most critics actually reacted fairly favourably to the pilot episode of Derek, which makes Ricky's decision to come out fighting now all the more baffling. Unless of course the bravado is a smokescreen to disguise the fact that a) Derek isn't really that controversial and b) the full series isn't really that good. It's by no means the worst programme I have ever seen.

There are some gentle laughs to be had. Kerry Godliman is superb as Hannah, the hybrid of Tim and Dawn from The Office, who runs the care home. And Karl Pilkington is fabulous at being Karl Pilkington in a bad wig as Dougie the caretaker. It is also refreshingly free of awkward celebrity cameos - although with Ricky's track record we can't rule out Michael Parkinson popping up in episode six trying to sell life insurance to the home's OAP residents.

Derek though takes schmaltz too far. It's basically a half-hour version of that pet charity campaign that featured a shaggy old dog shivering in the rain whimpering, 'Nobody wants you when you're old'. But instead of appealing for cash, Ricky is seeking credit. He'd love to be lauded for bravely tackling dangerous issues, when all he's really doing is throwing up a series of fairly obvious and nauseatingly sentimental crowd-pleasers with a side order of mawkish piano music.

No one is going to knock him for saying kindness is magic, or standing up for autistic people, or being nice about old people, or giving da yoof a second chance, or raging against busybody council bureaucrats. But he's hardly taxing himself - or us - here.

He's writing by bumper sticker. And while it might be magical for Ricky's ego if we were to continue to kindly avoid the massive elephant in that care home sitting room, I really can't bring myself to do it.

Because the simple fact is this. As well as being written by, performed by, directed by and edited by Ricky Gervais, Derek is also spoiled by him. His hammy performance as Derek Noakes is the biggest letdown of the entire show. Moreover, as a character, Derek is the least believable and least interesting thing in it.

If he didn't show up in the second series I don't think the show would suffer for it. I'd even go so far as to call any enforced absence a kindness.

David Walliams teases Simon Cowell on BGT

David Walliams has taken a cheeky swipe at Britain's Got Talent boss Simon Cowell asking him: "How old are you? You've had a lot of work done."

Amanda Holden fuming after jokes about ex, Les Dennis

Amanda Holden was fuming after Simon Cowell poked fun at her failed marriage to comedian Les Dennis.

Do you remember the day you discovered Kettle crisps? Dawn French does: it was at Kirsty MacColl's house, apparently - and amazing they were too. A revolution in fried potatoes that was up there in hers and Jennifer Saunders's list of top 10 nibbles, as shared with the nation over four daft minutes of primetime Christmas Day radio (French and Saunders, Radio 2). "I had some lovely nuts last night," giggled Saunders. Schoolgirl stuff, it's true, but French and Saunders always mined gold from the silliest, most irreverent material. And so, Dawn French dumped Simon Cowell live on air for Gary Barlow, hoping she would stop having to read Hello! magazine to keep tabs on her celebrity boyfriend. Saunders, thoroughly English in her expert self-deprecation, reeled off a list of prestigious awards her badly reviewed Spice Girl musical, Viva Forever, had won, while French gently ribbed her for her post-cancer press coverage. "You're not even brave any more!"

Best of all was the surprise kiss and tell on celebrity snoggers. Having smooched George Clooney, David Beckham and Brad Pitt over the years, French told Emma Bunton (who popped up on the Someone And Their Mum feature) that none of the world's hottest men came close to matching her real favourite: Jamie Theakston (who knew?), former children's TV presenter and Bunton's breakfast show co-host on Heart FM. But mostly it was a joy to simply listen to French and Saunders chatter in the background of my mum's busy kitchen, emitting exactly the right frequency of festive jolliness without being smug or irritating. No mean feat - you just wish they would do more shows.

When a show causes your hands to involuntarily clamp your face in a Munch-like scream of a Sunday evening, it seems careless not mention it. And so, while there was some good, honest programme-making in the schedules last week I must purge myself of Kookyville before returning to the sphere of the critically temperate.

"Welcome to a sketch show with a difference ..." purred Fenella Fielding, deployed in the Tom Baker/Little Britain role of ironic posho narrator. "These people are not actors or comedians and there's no script ... they're just real funny people."

And if you thought that some combo of comedians, acting, scripts or forethought was almost fundamental to the sketch-show format, then you obviously lack the basic contempt for human beings of the Kookyville commissioners. This, you see, was nothing less than the first example of "constructed reality comedy", in no way the kind of idea that would be farted out by an Apprentice contestant should they ever be asked to tackle TV production.

As with your basic constructed reality show, the idea was that a bunch of purportedly non-fictional people go about their purportedly non-fictional lives while excreting stilted dialogue in obviously staged set-ups. Only here, in a presumed attempt to justify that comedy billing, the dialogue came with the added stench of sub-Frankie Boyle obnoxiousness.

Not every scene was unwatchable. The one involving two Essex girls' protracted intellectual struggle at a farm was merely a failed audition piece for The Only Way is Essex, while Bradford entrepreneur Afzal safely plumped for being re-christened Ricky Meh-vais with his unofficial tribute to David Brent. More attention-grabbing, sadly, was swearword-happy pensioner Ronnie who, likely concerned about the mellow view of her generation being peddled by BBC1's Last Tango in Halifax, mimed a diarrhoea episode in her local Chinese. Before volunteering to chew Simon Cowell's balls.

So vanilla, you say? Well, then, I give you the mother-daughter pair Suzanne and Annierose, seen gawping and gasping at a dwarf before contemplating the horror of one trying to suckle Annierose's breasts. And - my favourite - the hotelier couple who joked about trying to throw a Thalidomide victim through a window, which also allowed for that old impressionist's standard routine, wholly ignored by Rory Bremner et al, the "ickle-wickle Thalidomide victim voice".

The programme was fair in one respect; the joke, such as it was, was on everyone: the short and disabled; the "real" comics, representing all those funny, uncouth sorts outside metropolitan media circles; the godforsaken viewer; and, of course, the beleaguered Channel 4, increasingly prone to trolling audiences for attention. In that respect, Kookyville succeeded, whipping up a social media gale and instant reviews along the lines of "Put this atrocity out of its misery". But the obvious point, inside the Twittersphere and out, is that exercising your right to provoke mindlessly will eventually result only in mass unfollows.

There appears to be an unwritten rule when it comes to animation in the UK that unless it's by Aardman, it'll be rubbish. Full English seems to obey this rule, which may explain why Channel 4 is airing it at 22.50.

The other reason of course being the crudeness of the humour. It's been described as the British Family Guy by some critics, which brings us to another unwritten rule on animation: if a British comedy's marketed as the British version of a successful American comedy, the British comedy will be rubbish in comparison. Again, Full English conforms.

The series centres on a "typical""British suburban family; put-upon father Edgar (Richard Ayoade), emo daughter Eve (Daisy Haggard), and horrid superrich father-in-law Ken (Oliver Maltman) who has an imaginary, gigantic, green friend called Squidge.

Full English doesn't seem to have one big problem but lots of little ones. The animation by Alex Scarfe (son of Gerald Scarfe) is very poor in terms of quality. The characters seem one dimensional (as opposed to their 2D visual portrayals).

But for me the worst is its attempts at satire. The plot of the first episode sees Eve go on Britain's Got Talent with her band, failing, but getting back on by pretending her parents are dead. How original. It's all the same, with Simon Cowell being a vicious git, contestants doing freakishly horrid acts, and others playing the sympathy vote. It's all been done before.

I'll concede there were some moments of laughter, mainly the more violent cartoonish sequences - like Squidge's attempts to hang himself, or the eldest son of the family hiding under the car, only to get badly hurt because he's so fat he gets terrible friction off the road as the car moves. But other than that I think that Full English hasn't got much going for it.

This new cartoon series is Britain's answer to ]Family Guy.But if it looks slickly American that's because, although it was created by brothers Jack and Harry Williams and Alex Scarfe - son of cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and Jane Asher - the animation was done in LA at the studio responsible for Futurama, and The Simpsons Movie.

Be warned that Full English isn't for kids. It features animated sex plus some stuff about Nazis and disabled people that is offensive in ways I haven't even worked out yet. And one character's pursuit of The Queen could well spark another royal scandal. Simon Cowell probably won't be a fan either.

The voice work is by Richard Ayoade as dad Edgar, Rosie Cavaliero as wife Wendy and Fonejacker's Kayvan Novak as both of their sons.

The standout tonight is daughter Eve (voiced by Daisy Haggard), who auditions for Britain's Got Talent with hilariously predictable results. I'm not sure about the father-in-law and his imaginary friend, though. Is Britain ready for a large green balloon?

From its chirpy Madness-style theme tune to a nicely judged opening Skins pastiche, this new animated sitcom centred around emo Eve and her family looks promising. However, as with so many full Englishes, looks can be deceiving and leave a rather bad taste. Here, bad taste is to the fore with jokes about anal sex, blowjobs and porking the Queen, and skits in which Simon Cowell says things like 'find me a ventriloquist with full-blown Aids or a stroke victim who does magic tricks'. It's a parallel universe in which Ant & Dec are gay, Welsh sheep have muddy handprints on their rears, and grandad has a hidden Nazi past. It's all a bit lame and puerile: if you're 14 you might like it, though nowhere near as much as Family Guy or The Simpsons. That Welsh sheep is pretty funny though.

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.