Lead Balloon

Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair's bitter-hearted comedy enters its third season and seems to have found its feet. We return to find Magda, the wonderfully sullen Polish help, has moved in until her boiler is fixed.

I had forgotten just how wonderful this series is - albeit wonderful in a deadpan sort of a way. The director Lindsay Anderson said once that the key to success was in the casting, and that is certainly the case here. Tonight, Magda (Anna Crilly), the surly East European help, moves in with the family because 'boiler is leaking gas'. She partitions the fridge like the Berlin Wall and poisons the son with her carthorse sausages, while Mel (Raquel Cassidy) - the wife who usually manages to keep it all together - gets splendidly drunk. I laughed out loud, which woke up my mother-in-law and startled the dog.

Although the return of Jack Dee's grumpy comedian Rick Spleen is always welcome, the start of series three misses the bull's eye a bit tonight. Maybe it's because there's no sense of cause or effect.

Mildly irritating things happen to Spleen, of course, but what's missing is that delicious realisation that he's brought it all on himself. (See Fawlty Towers or Curb Your Enthusiasm for more information). If Spleen's predicament is simply that he's surrounded by idiots then he might as well be Ben Harper from My Family.

Jack Dee returns as angst-ridden comedian Rick Spleen in this third run of the entertaining series, which sees us discovering a whole lot more about his complicated world and the colourful people who inhabit it.

Rick's socially inept behaviour continues to land him in a whole heap of trouble as he just can't seem to see the world how everyone else does.