Bad Move

All of life can be found in a good sitcom

Highbrow dramas and earnest documentaries are often held up as mirrors but shrewd historians know to look at comedy.

Is the TV sitcom dead now?

The way Jack Dee has been treated is hardly likely to persuade other comedy stars - and their agents - to abandon lucrative arena tours and panel show appearances to slog their guts out instead on a sitcom no one wants.

This sitcom, written by Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair, inexplicably limped to a second series. The set-up is that a couple (Dee and Kerry Godliman) have moved from the city to the country, where they find, among many other clichés trotted out in the various scenarios they face, that the grass isn't always greener. Joining the bad internet connection, weird neighbours and rude locals storylines of the first series were a leaking roof and moth infestation in the second. The lack of any discernible chemistry between the leads didn't help either, and Dee's lugubrious style meant Godliman had little to play off, so she upped her performance, but not in a good way. It's a shame, but it shows that sitcom (with two very good stand-ups as leads) can be less than the sum of its parts.

It is strange now to think that there was once something bracing about Jack Dee's brand of deadpan humour. The second series of this overly safe sitcom concludes with Dee's curmudgeonly city mouse being handed a key role at the village's annual festival, an honour that brings him face to face with the dreaded Lantern Man.

The caustic rural sitcom grumbles on with hapless urbanites Nicky (Kerry Godliman) and Steve (Jack Dee) still trapped in a clapped-out country cottage. With the septic tank in pungent revolt, a new web-design contract seems to offer a financial lifeline, so long as they can hoodwink the glitzy client.

Despite some middling reviews, the first series of the Jack Dee-fronted comedy about a couple swapping the city for the countryside garnered decent ratings. It returns for a second run, with Steve (Dee) and Nicky (Kerry Godliman) still having problems with their wreck of a home - not least the hole in the ceiling.

Bad Move: a confusing waste of Jack Dee's talents

The problem - OK, one of the problems - with Bad Move (ITV), Dee's sitcom with Pete Sinclair, which began a second series last night, is that Dee's character Steve is not made unhappy enough.

Review: Bad Move

Jack Dee's Bad Move is a tired and unimaginative sitcom about life in the countryside.

Jack Dee interview

'I once bought a house in the country, did it up, then didn't want to live there!'.