Tim Worthington

Off The Telly Review

Some will undoubtedly berate the show for an apparent tendency towards 'predictable' targets such as The Da Vinci Code, as recent reviews of his live shows have done. The important detail is Lee has plenty to say on these subjects - much of it both new and extremely funny - and any such criticism is doubtless founded more on a personal jadedness with the subject matter than with any problem with the actual material.

Off The Telly Series 2 Review

It remains to be seen how the series will fare without Chris Morris, he's clearly going to be missing out on a lot of fun. The audience, meanwhile, aren't. The IT Crowd has gone beyond the novelty value of being a breath of comedic fresh air, and is establishing itself - or in fact probably already has - as a great series in its own right.

Starring Richard Wilson [...] this highbrow sitcom set in the financial world was not quite in the same league as its more celebrated eighties counterparts, and suffered from some unrealistic and overblown pre-transmission publicity, but it was a likeable enough effort and it came as some surprise when the muted response to the first run led to the already-recorded second being shelved and eventually never transmitted. Now, surprisingly enough, both series have been released on DVD.

Screenwipe USA Review

Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe started out with a short pilot run earlier in the year, which was watchable but somewhat confused. Thankfully, between that and the more recent five-week series, many of the earlier problems have clearly been addressed and largely ironed out.

As Comic Strip films go, Sex Actually is not as good as The Strike, Didn't You Kill My Brother? or Gregory: Diary of a Nutcase. But it's not as bad as Queen of the Wild Frontier or The Funseekers. It's simply a muted and underachieving step back into the arena when most viewers were doubtless expecting a lot more, especially as the recent DVD box set release of their previous works throws its shortcomings into sharp relief.

Despite having been edited down from a much longer recording, Pete and Dud - The Lost Tapes was no "greatest hits" package and managed to live up to the implications of its title in impressive style. Most fans have never really known the majority of the featured sketches in anything other than précis form on the printed page.

Nathan Barley is not spectacular television, but neither is it appalling. It simply fails to do what it clearly set out to do. It has ended up in entirely the wrong bracket, resulting in a dull thud when it should - an indeed quite easily could - have sounded a loud fanfare.

At the end of the day, though, My Wrongs #8425-8249 & 117 is refreshingly offbeat for a present day television presentation, and definitely the sort of project that Channel 4 should be supporting rather than just relying on repeats of Friends.

In fact, the basic title of the programme was thoroughly deceptive - although it was billed as Ali G Before He Was Massiv, it did not in fact feature any footage of Ali G before he was "massiv" (hardly surprising, as the character was created for The 11 O'clock Show).