Cockroaches

TV review: Cockroaches, ITV2

It won't be the end of the world if you miss Cockroaches, but future episodes promise appearances from Alexander Armstrong and Nigel Planer and it certainly feels worth sticking with.

There are still ideas that don't really have legs, and still they are finding their way past the green light. Take Cockroaches, a new offering from ITV2. The idea of Freddy Syborn's script is that a nuclear holocaust has wiped out most of humanity, leaving teen couple Tom and Suze (Daniel Lawrence Taylor and Esther Smith) to roam the rural wastelands with their small child, conceived in haste on the night the bomb changed everything.

Essentially, it's the classic Seventies drama Survivors with jokes. That's the theory anyway, but alas the laughs are few and far between. The first few minutes, before disaster strikes, promised much. A newscaster warned of impending Armageddon, adding that no one had bothered to tell Africa and South America. The British Prime Minister (Robert Bathurst, not his first time as a comic PM: see also Hislop and Newman's comedy My Dad's the Prime Minister) was happier answering questions in Latin, a bit like You Know Who.

Spool forward a decade, and the future looked very like the past: jokes about not getting any sex, about in-laws, about cultural reference points (Suze reminisced about a blessed yesteryear in which "we had music, we had literature, we had Ant and Dec"). Suze supplied precious breast milk to both father and daughter, a joke much more creepily explored in Little Britain. The cast enlarged when they encountered a tribe of wood-dwelling dropouts led by Oscar (the ubiquitous Jack Whitehall), a Jafaican-spouting trustafarian ("Who talks like that?" wondered Tom). By the end of the first episode, attempting to enact the climactic immolation from The Wicker Man, he had been defeated. Tom accidentally hacked off his wanking finger.

ITV2 makes Cockroaches available online

Cockroaches is now available to watch online, before its premiere on ITV2.