Hut 33

Before the first series of Hut 33 was broadcast last year there were those who wondered whether it was a wartime-based comedy series too far. What humour could the writer James Cary glean from the activities of codebreaking folk? Quite a lot, as it happened, as Cary tacitly admitted that the Enigma machine was not in itself a laugh riot, and that a few broadly delineated comic characters were what was wanted.

As a result Hut 33 could be set anywhere, at any time, and still be just as funny. You've got your dithering commander Joshua, to whom the fact that Britain is even at war comes as a surprise, your lascivious landlady Mrs Best, your psychotic Polish refugee Minka, all of whom get their fair share of laughs.

Mention the crack squad of code breakers working from Bletchley Park in the Second World War and thoughts turn to the brilliant young men of Robert Harris' novel Enigma. The team in this sitcom are more of a crap squad and have been placed inside Hut 33 where their incompetence - more social than work-related - can be safely hidden.

It's a bit like Dad's Army in as much as the humour is gentle and the characters are intrinsically appealing. But the humour is far saucier: Robert Bathurst plays an officer terrified by a sex-crazed barmaid, for example, while the jokes about gay sex would never have been allowed in Walmington-on-Sea.