Lab Rats

There are nicely worked scenes in Chris Addison's sciencey sitcom this week as an officious inspector comes to visit the lab - another great turn by Kim Wall (last seen in Five's sitcom Angelo's). As luck would have it, he calls on the day Cara has accidentally defrosted the wealthy benefactor who was being kept cryogenically frozen in the lab, despite not being dead. It's more complicated than that but the details hardly matter; it's all about well-observed comedy moments, for instance when Alex (Addison) distracts the inspector by nudging the pictures on the wall crooked, knowing his adversary will feel compelled to put them right. I'm not convinced the characters or tone have quite gelled yet, but there are sparkles of something good.

Unfunny but imaginative, derivative but comfortably familiar - perhaps this is the way that sitcoms will now seek to seep into the consciousness so that distinctive series become a single amorphous blur of quaint humour. And that sums Lab Rats up; the first episode was enjoyable but only because we felt we'd seen it somewhere before, and were sporadically gripped by its quirky imagination - it could be the next Father Ted or it could be the latest corpse dropped into the mass grave dug for Only Fools And Horses spin offs.

Buried amid the kind of stuff that would barely have passed muster in the 70s (does Dr Beenyman's pink coat make him look gay? No - his hair does! How has daft Cara managed to get through life without a piano falling on her head? I haven't!) are signs of both comedy and intelligence, but when all the jokes are spatchcocked into a wafer-thin plot that veers uncertainly between reality and surreality, this particular experiment can only be deemed a failure.

If you've seen any of the preview clips of this show, then you'd know that you were heading for a traditional set-up: studio, fixed cameras, and a live audience. There is nothing wrong with that, plenty of our greatest sitcoms have been made that way. You'd also know that it stars Chris Addison, known as one of the most cerebral comedians on the circuit.

The traditional set-up was matched by traditional humour, but does traditional humour really have to be this... well, bad? We had people with funny names, people with funny accents, a slow Brummie girl and 'hilarious' misunderstandings. Now, I love an obvious, dumb joke that you can see coming a mile off as much as the next dude - Spaced was full of them - but you have to intersperse that with other types of humour. Otherwise it is just obvious and dumb.

And to be fair, Addison and his co-writer Carl Cooper did try. In fact, despite what I've written so far, I'm finding it hard to hate this programme because I know exactly what they were going for. They were trying to say you don't have to be edgy and sweary to be funny, that sitcoms in this style can have a warmth and quirkiness that something like Peep Show may lack. And I agree! And there were glimpses of invention, and I think Addison has charisma, and I like his pink coat. But let's face it, that's not enough. Not by a long way.

Lab Rats is a truly appalling new sitcom. The characters - geeks who work in a lab - are not even colourful enough to be stereotypes. Chris Addison, star and co-writer, is a man transformed (all for the bad) from his winning performance in The Thick of It as the wry chief geek.

Bad puns, redundant characters, lame jokes (about twenty involving 'gay hair') - and yes it really did end with a huge, rampaging snail. Not even the best surgeon in the land could save this.

It was clever stuff. But not very funny, all the same

BBC2's new series, Lab Rats seems to be further evidence that the sitcom tide is turning from the dark comedy of embarrassment to something lighter, dafter and more traditional.

As it turned out, yesterday's plot was no more sternly realistic than the characterisation - what with the team having 24 hours to perfect human cloning, but only succeeding in creating a six-foot snail.

Given that Lab Rats scrupulously observes that other traditional sitcom convention whereby a bad joke is preferable to none at all, it's not surprising that the show is distinctly patchy. Still, there were some pretty good running gags last night (many of them starring an amusing Russian) - and the whole thing also manages the useful trick of being extremely likeable. As a result, even when it's at its lamest, you somehow can't help wishing it well.

Television comedies are so difficult to get right, it's little wonder hardly anyone bothers any more. We're given occasional gifts such as Peep Show and The Thick of It, but they are niche - mainstream, studio-based comedies are almost nonexistent. So it's good to see the genial Lab Rats tiptoeing into the comedy wilderness with a funny blend of the surreal and the silly.

Co-written (with Carl Cooper) by its star, Chris Addison (a gifted comic with The Thick of It and a handful of Radio 4 series to his credit), Lab Rats is a playful comedy set in the science labs of St Dunstan's University. The staff are well-meaning idiots who put up Christmas decorations in August just to brighten the place up a bit, with a boss whose entire purpose in life appears to be the pursuit of chocolate. It's cheerfully daft, in an old-fashioned kind of way (ie it isn't politically incisive or satirical) and it prompts a lot of uncomplicated laughs.

You're going to need a lot of patience with this new sitcom, starring Chris Addison. Either that or copious supplies of the laughing gas that the hysterical studio audience seem to be on as the first episode unfolds.

That's a shame because potentially it's good, with shades of The IT Crowd, Father Ted and The Mighty Boosh. This is skewed comedy, where nothing is quite as it seems, the main protagonists are all well the other side of barking and the plot has plenty of unexpected twists and turns.

Having starred as government advisor Ollie Reader in the brilliant political satire The Thick of It, Chris Addison now gets a leg-up on the comedy ladder with his own prime-time sitcom.

Addison helms this likeable, madcap comedy as Dr Alex Beenyman, head of the Arnolfini Research Laboratory at St Dunstan's University. Naturally, not a single member of the lab has the first clue how to do their job. Professor John Mycroft (Hyperdrive's Geoff McGivern) has just spent the laboratory's budget on a huge statue of himself on horseback, slaying dragons.

Dr Beenyman's principal concern is that his white lab coat has just been dyed pink. He worries this makes him look 'gay', though his nitwitted colleague Brian Lalumaca (Dan Tetsell) and his hapless Brummie lab assistant Cara McIlvenny (Jo Enright) insist it's actually his hair that looks gay. Pandemonium is triggered by the visit of a Russian geneticist, Dr Kyrtistyges (pronounced 'Curtis Stigers', and played by Sevan Stephan), who's having trouble cloning his grandmother. The lab promises to fix the problem, but instead creates a gigantic snail.

The result is a catalytic reaction of Red Dwarf
and The IT Crowd, in a solution of Are You Being Served? And it's not a bad formula.