Just Around The Corner

Last night's viewing: Just Around the Corner, Channel 4

Despite a promising scenario, it turned into a bit of a one-show gag, the gag being how depraved humans have become.

Review: Just Around the Corner

Just Around the Corner had a great deal of fun creating its dingy world, and was largely convincing thanks to brilliant production design and ideas that were comically heightened but not totally implausible.

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Having set a new benchmark for sitcoms with Outnumbered, writing partners Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton know that expectations are high for their new pilot, part of Channel 4's Funny Fortnight. This one also centres around a squabbling suburban family, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. James Bolam and James Fleet play a father and son-in-law trying to negotiate a post-apocalyptic Britain in which economic collapse and climate change have created a lawless society of scavengers - think Survivors meets Steptoe & Son.

From the people behind Outnumbered comes a family-friendly sitcom set in 'the near future' - where public services are all but extinct, rising sea levels have turned Norwich into an island and austerity has taken its grubby hold. The gentle James Fleet leads us through a dystopia that, were it to be commissioned into a full sitcom, you'd hope would get a little darker.

Having created the reigning champion of family sitcoms in Outnumbered, Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton take the genre into new territory - the future. Not the distant future but, as the title suggests, a few decades hence when economic collapse and rising sea levels have transformed life in Britain. The Pilch family struggle by in a house powered by batteries on a street beset by floods. There's plenty of black humour: casual asides refer to the Isle of Norwich and when Mick (James Bolam) admits to gambling away the Triple-A batteries, he explains, "I put them all on a dog fight... I bet on the dog and the bloke won."

An unspecified apocalypse has hit the UK, but petty suburban concerns linger on for the Pilch family: curmudgeonly old geezer James Bolam, hapless son-in-law James Fleet and bolshy grand-daughter Jennie Jacques. The next-door neighbour is still an irritant, although arguments revolve not around parking or foliage maintenance, but who dumped the corpse over the fence. Laptops are used to squash flies. And a formidable 'area commander' is on hand to dispense summary justice. There's the kernel of a good idea in Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's show (their first since Outnumbered), but Just Around the Corner is a little too low key for its own good. The targets are soft, and the dull colours and dreary lives infect the writing and performances: the sitcom equivalent of a wet weekend.

Amid such sparkling absurdity this offering from Funny Fortnight, Just Around the Corner, lay like a damp squib. It is a comedy from Outnumbered creators Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, about the Pilch family (Jameses Fleet and Bolam as son-and-father-in-law, and Jennie Jacques as Fleet's recalcitrant teenage daughter Kia), who live in what is now the isle of Norwich in a globally warmed and flooded Britain. The script was waterlogged, but much could be forgiven for Daisy Beaumont's shining turn as terrifying regional tyrant Big Delia. When paired with Fleet's peerless dithering, you felt happiness begin to break out once more.

A climate-changed, bank- collapsed England of the near future, where the Dutch are the despised immigrants (Holland having disappeared under water), is the subject of this Funny Fortnight sitcom pilot from Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin (Outnumbered and Drop the Dead Donkey). A promising scenario delivered by James Fleet and James Bolam.