Will Merrick

Dead Pixels, E4, review - gamers for a laugh

Witty sitcom about videogame addicts pits real life against fantasy

World of Dorkcraft: this caustic new sitcom pokes fun at hardcore acolytes of online role-playing games, following exasperated office drone Meg (Raised by Wolves's brilliant Alexa Davies) and skittish shut-in Nicky (Will Merrick) as they happily ignore any and all real-world responsibilities to pursue intangible gains in the orc-filled world of Kingdom Scrolls. Creator Jon Brown - a writing veteran of Fresh Meat - clearly knows his virtual subject, mining surprising amounts of pathos and raunch from a plausibly gaudy gaming realm.

Dead Pixels review

There are perils in making a comedy about gaming. After all, the core market may be too firmly glued to their screens to tune in, while the geeky image of the pastime that endures even as more people partake could be a turn-off for non-players.

Dead Pixels generates comedy from gaming highs & lows

As if there wasn't enough good comedy on British television at the moment, with This Time, Fleabag, Derry Girls, Home and Timewasters currently on the air, Dead Pixels has now arrived to win laughs from the world of gaming.

Comedy-drama about the rise of snooker and the fall of Alex "Hurricane" Higgins, who ignited during the power cut-ridden 70s, a symbol of the reckless flamboyance of the decade. He is undone by Steve Davis, protege of Barry Hearn. It's a story frequently told in one-liners - "Flair player? That just means you miss." However, Luke Treadaway brilliantly conveys Higgins' auto-destructiveness, while Will Merrick eventually gets beyond Davis's cultivated robo-nerd image.

Retro 80s nostalgia delivered in a distinctly modern format: The Rack Pack, a comedy-drama reliving snooker's heyday, debuted this week as an iPlayer-only film. "I think snooker is going to be big - bigger even than wrestling," a geezerish Barry Hearn (Kevin Bishop) told a meek Steve "interesting" Davis (Will Merrick) as he signed him up and unleashed his plans for a baize of glory, taking the sport from smoke-filled snooker halls to, er, smoke-filled tournament halls and massive TV-ratings success. Opposite the milk-loving Davis, Luke Treadaway sunk his teeth into the Alex "Hurricane" Higgins story, bringing just enough warmth and pathos to nudge the film past a cartoon portrait of the hard-living People's Champion. "I'm a snooker player - in the end, you're always on your own," he admitted.

The picaresque world of 70s and 80s snooker was so obviously ripe for retrofitted TV drama that the only surprise is that this feature-length tragicomedy is an iPlayer-only affair. Luke Treadaway and Will Merrick enjoy themselves as broad, even scurrilous, caricatures of Alex Higgins and Steve Davis, respectively. Higgins is cast as snooker's darkly irresistible demon who self-destructs even as Davis, in cahoots with ruthless promoter Barry Hearn, is taking the game into every living room. This narrative thrust is a slight over-simplification but does make for high drama.