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.

Smile - you're on Candid Camera? Not bleedin' likely if the whole nation is laughing at you. You had to feel for the victims in Olivia Lee's Naughty Bits, particularly the chap she cornered in a bathroom showroom, claiming to be his girlfriend. She wanted to know why he had a problem with intimacy, and interrogated his many failings. The guy looked on bemused: he didn't know that Lee was a comedian with an arsenal of hidden cameras. He took her intrusion in good spirit. That was admirable: there are so many crazy people out there, one's natural reaction might have been to call the police.

Lee's show works on a brilliant premise though - that Carrie Bradshaw is the most annoying person on the planet. So Lee's character, desperately searching for love, mad and delusional, stalks men in a deranged quest to find Mr Right. The mickey-taking of Carrie is easily the funniest thing, even if it is one-note: Lee bashes away on a kid's typewriter play-set, witlessly musing on what she has done wrong so far and what she can do to snare her ideal man.

This was very very funny, if you find Carrie to be beyond irritating and never more so than in those scenes in Sex and the City where she lies on her bed asking the dumbest of questions in voiceover: So I got to thinking... Like Carrie, Lee's character runs about in diaphanous dresses with huge appliquéd rosettes. She just needs a bus to splash her.

The great British public seem worryingly at ease with a woman assailing them and acting insanely. One lady kindly lent her make-up, which Lee used to make herself look like a cat. A guy in a sofa shop had to put up with her acting out being his girlfriend. A doctor collared by her elderly Jewish momma incarnation (Bubba Barbara, desperate to marry off her daughter), was left scratching his head when both women ran off when he revealed he was married - and therefore unsuitable.

Perhaps this is one of the positive outcomes of reality shows and living with CCTV cameras on every street corner: everyone thinks they're on TV all the time so behaves utterly nonchalantly in bizarre situations. A special mention to the shopkeepers who remained so equable when Lee went in with a toaster with what she insisted was a faulty hard drive. It's a toaster, one of the men repeated. She left, muttering about feeling patronised.

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.