Susannah Fielding

This Time with Alan Partridge first-look review

If you've never seen Steve Coogan's comic creation before, sit back and enjoy The One Show parody. But if you're a Partridge fan, This Time is everything you've been waiting for and more.

I Want My Wife Back will need to do better

In the end, though, this was a comedy that was mainly stuck in neutral. It would really need to shift up a gear or three to make me want to watch a second series.

Unfortunately for the channel, I Want My Wife Back is one of the worst sitcoms I've seen in a very long time and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended its run in a less prominent timeslot. The series follows the exploits of Murray (Ben Miller) a banker whose promotion at work means that he's never at home to be by the side of his wife Bex (Caroline Catz). I then didn't blame her one iota when she decided to leave him on her fortieth birthday after he'd blown off yet another date in favour of work. However this is a sitcom in which Murray is meant to be the sympathetic romantic and so writers and creators Mark Bussell and Justin Sbrensi try their best to make us root for him as he runs round trying to find out if Bex has left him. I Want My Wife Back feels like it was based on a singular idea about what would happen if a man discovered his significant other was leaving him on the day he was planning a surprise birthday for her. But basing a series around one single event isn't a good idea and especially in the case of this sitcom where the central gag runs out of steam pretty quickly. As the majority of the focus is on Murray and Bex, the rest of the characters are simply thinly-drawn stereotypes who don't feel realistic at all. A case in point is Emma (Susannah Fielding), a co-worker of Murray who is clearly in love with him even though she could do a lot better. Similarly the main gag involving Murray's boss Curtis (Stewart Wright) is that he's having an affair and often gets our hero to lie for him so he can continue his philandering ways. Every joke in I Want My Wife Back failed to hit the spot including the episode's big set piece in which Murray has his ear bitten off while looking for Bex at the hospital in which she works. The conclusion of the first episode, in which Murray and Bex are whisked off to spend a holiday in Turkey together, was as an unfunny as what had gone before and after spending half an hour with these characters I had no desire to continue. I do feel it's a shame that the comedies that seem to get the most amount promotion tend to be disappointingly unfunny whilst the real gems such as Detectorists and Fresh Meat get hidden away. I do think that we can do comedy well in this country when given the chance but I Want My Wife Back was cringe-inducing from beginning to end and featured both a miscast leading man and a complete lack of anything even resembling a joke.