Green Wing

Green Wing: Tube Talk Gold

Green Wing gathered a cult audience when it aired a few years ago, but what was it about the show that enthralled viewers so much?

Your next box set: Green Wing

Crammed with wickedness, absurdity, anarchy and sexual inappropriateness, Green Wing is great TV comedy.

Show me a funny indigenous comedy series; show me one that has been made in the past five years, other than Green Wing.

Why I Still Can't Make Up My Mind About... Green Wing

Normally we split these posts into 'Why I Love... A Certain Programme' and 'A Certain Programme - Why?' But the fact is, I just can't make up my mind when it comes to Green Wing. I realise, by the way, that this isn't the most topical show that I could turn my attention to, but for that you can blame the fact that Channel Four are currently allowing you to download or stream the best of their homegrown comedy shows for free, on 4oD. I already own and treasure my Peep Show and Spaced box-sets, so I thought I'd have a go at Green Wing.

Stephen Mangan interview: 'I've got a face for comedy'

Vain, self-obsessed, arrogant - Stephen Mangan has a knack for bringing the worst out in himself for his roles, he tells Maddy Costa.

An Interview with Green Wing's Pippa Haywood

It takes a hell of an actress to play Green Wing's despicable yet lovable slut Joanna Clore - here the ultra-cool Pippa who pulls it off, talks very, very openly to handbag about acting, wrinkles and the rest of the cast.

The first series of Green Wing (Friday, C4) was one of the most freshly funny and crisply innovative comedies for years. The humour was all based in the character, not the situation. The story lines were negligible; there were no catch phrases; it was surreal in a way we hadn't seen since Monty Python; and the cast were actors being funny from inside a characterisation, not stand-up comics bolting a cartoon persona onto the back of gags. There had been a worrying gap between the first and second series, but finally we got the preview ads, and a run of the previous series as a fanfare and a reminder. Then the new one began with a dream sequence. Oh my God, I could hardly believe my eyes. Was I asleep? No, it really was a dream sequence.

Now, every 11-year-old knows dream sequences are the lowest form of plotting solution, lower than unexplained superpowers such as the ability to stop time or become invisible; even lower than a magic get-better potion. Within two minutes, Green Wing had destroyed itself, lost its assured grip on the cliff of comedy and tumbled into the abyss of embarrassing overacting, formless gurning and pointless repetition. What had once looked Dada-ishly brilliant now looked like stoned improv from a show-off's drama school. The lack of plot and coherent narrative that previously had been a blessed freedom was revealed to be a formless free-for-all, brilliant performances as silly mannerisms. Nothing I've seen this year has disappointed me as sharply as the second series of Green Wing. As Tom Paine so poignantly pointed out, only a step separates the sublime from the ridiculous.

Oliver Chris: My Life In Travel

'Sea lions are like underwater Labradors - they're just so friendly'

The eyebrows have it

After the slapstick of Green Wing, how will Tamsin Greig play the Bard, asks Stephen Armstrong.

Winging It

He was standing around, minding his own business, Julian Rhind-Tutt tells Zoe Williams, when he got 'very, very lucky' and became an actor. Couldn't talent, she asks, have had something to do with it?