Strap In - It's Clever Peter

Clever Peter is a sketch troupe featuring Richard Bond, Edward Eales-White and William Hartley, and by the sounds of things a rather good one.

It's a short programme, consisting of four episodes 15 minutes long, but the sketches in it were entertaining and rather appropriately, clever. Sketches featured an MP who claimed expenses on a pygmy hippo and is then ordered as punishment to kill the Danish ambassador (who actually has a Dutch accent); a diary written in gobbledegook; a man obsessed with lists leaving his girlfriend; and an old woman who has an enterprising way of dealing with door-to-door salesmen.

The humour in it is slightly surreal, but it's very good, while the performances were energetic. It certainly sounds like Strap In - It's Clever Peter could build into a more successful programme.

There was fine writing in Strap In - It's Clever Peter, a 15-minute, no-time-to-be-bored sketch show by the Clever Peter troupe. There were nods to Stanley Unwin and gobbledegook - "Oh, I knew the memory of his smelt would stay in my pumf forever" - though among the funniest lines were the wordless ones given to "Mr Pippo the tiny hippo" caught up in the MPs' expenses scandal.

I also liked the obsessive listmaker dumping his girlfriend by phone, and 86-year-old Mrs Boyd and her ruthless techniques for dealing with door-to-door salesmen. The whole thing had that undergrad feeling of seeming very pleased with itself, but that's fine if it's funny - which it was.

Starting any new comedy four-parter with a skit on MPs expenses seems a bit uninspired given just how long jokes about duck houses and moats have been around now. But, the first offering of 15-minute long satire, Strap In - It's Clever Peter, from the writing team that created Cabin Pressure (2008) and Another Case Of Milton Jones (first aired in 2005), had much to recommend it. It's a wise decision to make it very short, it's sharp witted, impressively silly and for the main, pretty original. Older listeners may have noted an obvious steal of Monty Python's imprisoned milkmen sketch, here an 86-year-old woman turning the tables on various conning tradesmen. That aside, this first instalment was fresh, consistently funny and thankfully not too self-indulgent - the curse of many new comedies.