Simon Moore

Badults, the sitcom from live sketch favourites Pappy's, bangs straight in there with a self-penned theme tune, and an image of the three boys dressed up as The Inbetweeners, before cutting to the three in the adult flat-share that is the sitcom's set.

Badults started under the working title The Secret Dude Society, which is proof, if such proof were needed, that Pappy's are quite bad at naming things.

The title, and the show's title sequence, give the audience a bad steer - because this doesn't at all touch on Him & Her-like themes of arrested development, or Inbetweeners-ey coming of age gross out stuff: it's Pappy's, and they're doing Pappy'sish stuff.

It's a real shame, because anyone who has seen Pappy's live knows that they're not normally bad at beginnings.

This one does little to ease the viewer into the world of their show.

Though beginnings are interesting things, sitcoms are notoriously difficult to judge from their first few episodes.

Sitcom history is lightly dusted with shows that started a little uncertainly, and most of them were more faulty than simply having an undercooked title sequence.

Once the show itself gets going, it's inventive, gag rich and very funny.

Built around the theme of money, this first episode rockets through a rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches tale at a pace that would put The Fast Show to shame, while putting together an impressively tightly-woven tapestry of highly televisual gags.

Get past that title sequence, tell yourself it's called Pappy's: The Sitcom, and I think you'll enjoy.

It could do with a better opening, but it's a very strong beginning.

Count Arthur Strong, a transfer of Steve Delany's infinitely long-running Radio 4 show to TV, takes the first few minutes of its first episode to break the audience in to what the show is going to be.

Opening with proper thesp and straight-man-in-chief Rory Kinnear, the show begins in single-camera glossiness, and slowly guides the viewer, via a hinting laugh track and an open door into the Count's multi-camera world.

Graham Linehan has joined Count Arthur creator and performer Delany as co-writer of the TV version of the show, and it's difficult not read this as a version The IT Crowd's opening scene, albeit with a much more pronounced tonal and visual shift.

In subsequent episodes, we open with a parpy theme tune and Arthur (Delany) and Michael (Kinnear) standing in front of a proscenium arch, which is about right for the old-school staginess of the piece.

Telly vision: Badults and Count Arthur Strong

Beginnings are interesting things, and few beginnings are more interesting than sitcom opening sequences.

Review: Pappy's: Last Show Ever - Newcastle Stand

With stand-up seemingly mired in continual controversy and ill-feeling, it's not difficult to see why these sketch shows are on the rise.