Lead Balloon

Frank Skinner said his favourite sitcom of the moment was Jack Dee's Lead Balloon. A surprising choice, perhaps, because it had more of an impact on BBC4 than it did when it transferred to BBC2, and suffered from comparisons with Curb Your Enthusiasm?

Nonsense, said Skinner. It's the best sitcom that anyone from the comedy circuit has done, obviously I was hoping it would be shit.

With Jack Dee making a perfect grouchy everyman and his long suffering family and small circle of 'friends' providing amiable foils for his general moans and mishaps, Lead Balloon goes down really well, despite the show's name.

The squirm factor is not quite as strong as with Curb Your Enthusiasm but this low-key sitcom is shot like a drama without a laugh track and while the dialogue and acting feel improvised, the plots are relatively tightly planned out to reach a specific conclusion.

Do you recall the toad beneath the harrow who knows where each tooth of the harrow goes? Week by week Dee, his face curdling, feels a new tooth of the harrow bite home. I enjoyed the series very much and I didn't even get a balloon.

When Lead Balloon started, I obsessed about its debt to Curb Your Enthusiasm and whether it was too self-regarding in having a comedian playing a comedian. But I guess what counts is whether it's funny, and Lead Balloon has delivered lovely moments as well as scene-stealing turns from Anna Crilly's Magda, as perpetually gloomy as a Soviet tenement block, and Tony Gardner as a shell-shocked City trader-turned-organic restaurateur. And leading it all is Dee, who turns childish pettiness into something almost endearing.

Jack Dee's new sitcom Lead Balloon has gone down like anything but. It is so successful it has grown too big for BBC4. It will now be broadcast on BBC2 as well.

Whatever channel it's on, Lead Balloon is well worth watching. It is a delectable comedy of everyday embarrassment, and as such feels exquisitely British. But in fact America did it first, with Larry David's sublime Curb Your Enthusiasm. Lead Balloon is such a good rip-off of Curb Your Enthusiasm that you sometimes forget it's a fake: the set piece in each episode where Jack Dee, aka Rick Spleen, retreats into a private fantasy, such as shooting the postman, or hand carving missing letters on a christening mug, is a superb innovation.

But more often, unfortunately, Lead Balloon shows awkward joints where Curb Your Enthusiasm has invisible seams. Larry David is a fundamentally good man, driven to obnoxious behaviour; Rick Spleen is just an obnoxious man. The same goes for the guest actors in each episode of Lead Balloon: they tend to go looking for confrontation, rather than finding it creep inexplicably upon them. Lead Balloon is a more callow creation than CYE. I don't feel bad about saying so. To make a show as derivative as Lead Balloon is to invite comparisons.

Reflections on his Spleen

Jack Dee is interviewed by The Guardian about why he wrote the comedy and what his key influences were.

A programme called Lead Balloon is a hostage to critical misfortune, but then I expect Jack Dee knows that. This miserabilist sitcom about the Pooterish home life of a stand-up comic, written and performed by a stand-up comic, is better than it sounds. Observational humour is as funny as the observer, not necessarily what's observed. This series is part of a new trend of comedy shows that don't make you laugh; you just nod your head and mutter, That's really funny. It's a Darwinian improvement on the tyranny of the set-up-gag guffaw, and I approve of it. Laughter is ugly and common.

The first two episodes of Lead Balloon on BBC4 have been nothing but a joy. Jack Dee might be playing Jack Dee with a sillier name, but his performance in a programme scripted with beauty and precision makes you forgive any element of typecasting or taking the easy option which the unduly churlish could launch his way. After all, the best writers write about what they know best. It's logical.

So, naturally, the first 10 minutes of Lawson's polite gossip with Dee was about the making of the series and Dee's own feelings as an actor and the writer of a semi-autobiographical sitcom [...] Whether Lawson's guests have had anything to plug or not - and in the main, they haven't - is only incidental, as proved by the case of Dee, through whom we got a fascinating, candid 50-minute insight into a complicated life and career.

Jack Dee: A touch of Spleen

Another interview with Jack Dee about the first series of Lead Balloon.