Victoria Pile

Not before time, the creator of Smack the Pony and Green Wing, Victoria Pile, is returning with a new comedy. Campus, set in the fictional Kirke University, will screen on Channel 4 from 5 April. The semi-improvised sitcom piloted on the channel's Comedy Showcase in 2009 when it attracted good reviews and a smattering of criticism for describing Stephen Hawking as a "famously disabled spastic" in the first minute. I've now seen the first two episodes and can confirm that that joke, from David Brent-esque vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman), has made the cut, but there is still much to appreciate in Campus. Like Green Wing, the hour-long episodes have a surreal, stop-start momentum, a woozy soundtrack from Jonathan Whitehead and a familiar cast of characters: lecherous lecturer Matt Beer and bespectacled spod Imogen Moffatt are already set to be the show's Guy and Caroline. Watch out, too, for the administrative office, staffed by rising stars Sara Pascoe and Will Adamsdale.

Filming starts on Victoria Pile's Campus

Filming has started on Campus, writer Victoria Pile's first comedy project for Channel 4 since the Bafta-winning Green Wing.

Finally, Channel 4's Comedy Showcase returns - essentially The X Factor for sitcoms. Every week there's a new pilot, with the most popular being commissioned for a whole series - before, presumably, having a nervous breakdown and being admitted to the Priory.

First up for the phone vote was Campus - the new project from the Green Wing team: essentially Green Wing but set in a red-brick university, not a hospital. The show is already so well-formed that finding it having to audition for a series seems bizarre - like Patti Smith turning up to an X Factor audition in Cardiff, and doing Piss Factory to a gob-smacked Simon Cowell.

The writer/director/producer Victoria Pile has two trademark techniques: creating worlds where a horrible, dark surreality keeps oozing through the cracks; and characters who take childlike gestures to extremes - walking past a shelf and pushing all the books off with a triumphal air, stealing lipstick from a handbag and putting it on during a conversation, shouting "Shut!" at a door that's already shutting.

Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character - a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn - wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.

The 2007 Comedy Showcase resulted in series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents, from which The Kevin Bishop Show has made it to a second series - making it very much the Leona Lewis of the enterprise. But Campus is far superior stuff to Kevin Bishop. It makes Kevin Bishop look like ... David Sneddon. Campus - it's a yes from me. I'm putting you through to Boot Camp.

This is the series where Channel 4 kicks some fledgling sitcoms out of the nest to see which ones will fly. The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents all came out of 2007's try-outs and I'd put money on Campus getting the green light - especially as it's set in Kirke University (motto: "With Wings").

It feels like Green Wing Goes To College, because it was made by that show's creator Victoria Pile and her team. Like Green Wing it has that same air of institutionalised in-breeding about it and is backed by another distinctively woozy soundtrack by Trellis.

There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good. It's as if the challenge was how weird can we make these people and still have them breathe oxygen?

Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy and Caroline.

Comedy Showcase is one of Channel 4's most valuable strands. By broadcasting standalone comedies, it's about as close as television gets nowadays to giving established and up-and-coming comic writers the right to fail. Inevitably this freedom results in much riskier and more innovative work, and the first round of programmes in 2007 led to series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents. The curtain-raiser in this new series was written by Victoria Pile of Green Wing fame. It is, in fact, exactly like the surreal hospital- set comedy series, but transferred to a university setting, with the same heady mix of bizarre characters, savage banter, surreal fantasy and bracing filth. Anyone who enjoyed Green Wing should feel immediately at home.

How many misfits does it take to run a university? Should this question ever pop up in the miscellaneous round of a pub quiz somewhere in Weirdchester, you'll be grateful for having watched Campus, the new show conceived by Victoria Pile and the team behind Green Wing and Smack The Pony.

At the show's heart is chief misfit Jonty de Wolfe. Played by Andy Nyman, the megaphone-wielding, peppermint tea-sipping Vice Chancellor turns kooky, quirky and crass up to eleven. Joseph Millson (Casino Royal) is lecherous literature lecturer Matthew Beer, and Dolly Wells (Star Stories) takes a marvellous turn as a behind-the-scenes worker nicknamed "the big shit" as a schoolgirl. "Because I was a big shit," she explains, "and also because I do big shits."

Campus is set in the fictitious Kirke University and looks every bit the "ensemble comedy". The camerawork is jittery without irritating, and the writers have conjured a veritable symphony of comic characters. On the evening the show was introduced with no little wryness as "not the Green Wing set in a university." Derivative? Perhaps. But I'd be happy to watch the Green Wing set anywhere, thanks very much.