Tim Teeman

The Times Review

Beautiful People, like Gimme Gimme Gimme, is loud and brash. I got into a total decade and age muddle with it.

Beautiful People is funny and adventurous, breaking off for dream or fantasy sequences and Jonathan Harvey doesn't want to tell a conventional tale, so homophobia is not really an issue.

ITV2's new comedy No Heroics is fast, funny and a little ingenious: a collection of very British superheroes gather in a pub to compare war wounds and see who is most famous after a day of fighting crime. Like Heroes, then, but with cheese and onion crisps. Their superhero suits are a bit rubbish.

Patrick Baladi's Excelsor is the smarmy frontrunner, but Drew Pearce, the creator/writer, established an engaging collection of pretenders to the throne: The Hotness, a sexually inadequate 'cape' with a penchant for heat; Electro-clash, who let a shop owner get shot and suffer from his injuries because he was sexist; Timebomb is Spanish, depressed, unhinged; She Force is a superhero with the twittering insecurities of Carrie Bradshaw.

The comic strangeness was prevalent in The Wrong Door, a sketch show that relied heavily on technical and CGI trickery. One very funny sketch featured a group of sprites escaping from a bottle and making a poor drunken fool's life that much more horrible by texting a malicious message to his girlfriend and framing him for watching hotel porn.

One young woman was dating a dinosaur, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, who visits her parents' home and destroys everything within, including eating the family dog. A robot stomps over London asking where it left its house keys, destroying swaths of the metropolis. The show is hit and miss - Superhero Tryouts, an X Factor for wannabe superheroes, was laboured and directionless - but the writers Ben Wheatley and Jack Cheshire (who also direct and produce) have at least originated a novel and bizarre show.

Their strangest creation, and the most brilliantly maddening, is a scientist's unfortunately successful attempt to create a new life form. Somehow a malformed DNA structure means that this creature is the most irritating thing on the planet. The scientists hate it. We hate it. This creature destroys everything it touches, but only after wheedling, pleading and manipulating. Are we there yet? it repeats. Eventually, the guy who took the creature in drove at a post to end it all.

Lab Rats is a truly appalling new sitcom. The characters - geeks who work in a lab - are not even colourful enough to be stereotypes. Chris Addison, star and co-writer, is a man transformed (all for the bad) from his winning performance in The Thick of It as the wry chief geek.

Bad puns, redundant characters, lame jokes (about twenty involving 'gay hair') - and yes it really did end with a huge, rampaging snail. Not even the best surgeon in the land could save this.

Last night, it was decision time: The Invisibles v The Inbetweeners. The loser, the shambolic, hopeless, where-are-the-matchsticks-to-keep-my-eyelids-from-closing-FOREVER loser, was The Invisibles, which finally appeared after weeks of trailers featuring spidery, abseiling figures, implying a drama with the stylistic dash of The Thomas Crown Affair. That, like the drama itself, was a con.

This was a drama with something to say - something obvious and clunking - about ageing. Over and over again. The Invisibles, you see, also refers to the elderly within society. So, Morris (Head) hated the new block of flats that he and his wife (Jenny Agutter) moved into because they were for old people and had smoke alarms; and under the door drifted leaflets for coffee mornings and bridge-for-beginners' courses.

Lame drama chafed against lamer comedy. The duo first tried to burgle a friend's place as practice (they banged their knees, leading to more grumbling about ageing). The tone went absurdly Mission: Impossible as they prepared to rob a gangland chief's place (expensive bits of kit, slinky music). But they were caught, beaten up and eventually saved by the pub landlord, a younger guy in thrall to them because his dad was once part of their gang.

To match Morris's grouchiness, I'll say that burglary is unpleasant, burglars are not to be celebrated, especially ones such as Morris and Sid, so totally lacking in comedic value. Surely we live in an age in which the myth of the gentleman criminal is tarnished: the subtext of The Invisibles is that crime was once a stylish business, with swaggering sophisticates robbing for the hell of it rather than the next crack fix, which is tosh. Anyway, Morris and Sid are dislikeable, inept, poorly characterised crooks. I hope they get collared or someone nicks their free bus passes.