Toby Anstis

One Minute Mills and Mongrels

Mongrels has already been host to some surprising guests stars - from Biggins to Toby Anstis - so the news that Scott Mills will soon be popping up in an episode might not seem too unfathomable. But Scott has a further surprise for you!

I think we all know what BBC Three is for - in a nutshell: bum bum titty titty ha-ha - but its new sitcom, Mongrels, has caused me no small amount of odd times.

On paper, I am so there. Its pitch makes me pitch. A puppet show, but for adults? About a metrosexual fox, mardy pigeon, spoilt Afghan hound and a borderlineretarded Mexican cat called Marion (male)? A show in which the humour comes in "salty dark tang", and other savoury flavours for the amusement epicure? That is an entertainment buffet that I shall approach with a large plate. I am going to fill my hoot-boots on this one. Step back, boys - Mummy's on her lunch break, and it's going to be soup and a rofl.

And, indeed, the first two minutes looked insanely promising. The metrosexual fox - Nelson - is fixing up blind dates on MySpace and abusing someone else's credit card. We cut to the former CBBC presenter Toby Anstis, staring at his credit card bill and exclaiming, "Thirty-six quid? To Duchy Originals?" before cutting back to the fox stuffing its face with Ginger Thins. The sheer random unexpectedness of it was rousing - I thought I was in for a half-hour of solid lulz-a-poppin'.

But three minutes later, a trend started to emerge. Gags on 9/11, Harold Shipman, Christopher Reeve, Anne Frank and Richard Whiteley - castration, urination, a dog trying to poo on a bed, and a song called F*** Chickens, in which the conceit was that chickens are a bit like immigrants. Look - these are nervous times for comedy, particularly at the BBC. In a post- Sachsgate world, approval for edgy humour is a nightmare, and getting new comedy commissioned in the first place is about as easy as trying for a unicorn with IVF. Mongrels felt as though someone had taken a winningly daft idea and then top-loaded it with every single edgy joke submitted to the BBC in the past two years, so that Compliance could go through them all in one time-efficient go. The end result was to have you still wincing from the previous miss-hit base joke as the next one came along. It made you feel a bit... sore, after a while.

It was a sad waste of fake fur and a dandy, metrosexual fox.

I'm reviewing Mongrels because it is the most radical take on furry animals since The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Its twin jokes are to imbue animals with the worst rather than most charming human attributes and, second, to challenge the convention that puppets are fit only for children. Mongrels, which began an eight-part post-watershed run last night, is the dirtiest puppet show since Zippy made a foreskin joke on an in-house Christmas edition of Rainbow.

Actually, Nelson, the fox, was one of the gentler beasts among the creator Adam Miller's dark menagerie. A lonely Boggle cheat, he was a gentle soul whose greatest crime, initially, was to pretend on a dating site that he was Toby Anstis (a former star of CBBC, you know). But then his date, Wendy, lied too. For one thing she was a chicken. For another she was married - she claimed to a "wife-pecker" who abused her so badly that she mislaid. "It was," she said, "like giving birth to an omelette." Intimacy becomes an issue for these DNA-crossed lovers. When a fox and a chicken kiss it looks like the fox is having supper. In the end, tiring of her lies, Nelson cuts off Wendy's head with a plastic knife in an inner-city Mississippi Fried Chicken restaurant.

Nelson is still nicer than the bitchy Afghan bitch Destiny who at a Strictly Dog Dancing session with her widowed owner remarks that most people have to fly a plane into a skyscraper before they are surrounded by this many virgins. Meanwhile, Marion the cat is well on the way to becoming a serial murderer of old ladies. Harold Shipman got a mention, as did Anne Frank. Mary Whitehouse once complained about an episode of Pinky and Perky. She would have had a field day with this. Best taken with a couple of pints of lager, Mongrels is a hit even if you're sober. Surely, though, it should be called Creature Discomforts.

That meerkat ad has a lot to answer for: here we have an adult puppet show in which one of the main characters (a cat) has an almost identical accent. What those meerkats don't do is rob little old ladies, defraud celebrities or swear their furry little heads off, which is what the parade of animal puppets indulge in here. The sterling cast includes Katy Brand voicing a cynical pigeon and tonight's 'special guest', Toby Anstis. Utterly stupid but very funny.

Watch a fox take advantage of Toby Anstis

So, tonight's the night! Mongrels starts on BBC Three at 10pm.

Dog Dazed Afternoon combines high production standards with pleasant comedy. In fact, it turns out to be something of a story for our credit-crunch times, following two unemployed, socially awkward 20-somethings through their ill-fated dog-walking business. It's an agreeable play in the age-old comedy shorthand of "all men are idiots and it's only women who can save the day".