Monks

Monks axed

The BBC have decided not to make a series of the monastery-set sitcom Monks, which aired earlier this year.

The third and final show in BBC1's revived Comedy Playhouse series was an ensemble piece set in a tiny, debt-ridden monastery.

Broad doesn't even begin to describe the comedy, and the characters rarely achieve the giddy heights of two dimensions. Yet there was something eminently likeable about Monks - not least the inclusion of several funny jokes, not always a given in a new sitcom.

However, the show is scuppered by the casting of stand-up comedian Seann Walsh as layabout, fixer and benefits cheat Gary. Put bluntly, he cannot act. Stilted in delivery and underpowered in performance, Walsh is asked to drive the several plot lines and just isn't up to the task.

Review: Monks, BBC One

A promising cast is marooned in a Seventies sketch show.

When a sitcom arrives tagged with a premise so flimsy a butterfly could tear it asunder, it had better be something special. In the case of Seann Walsh vehicle Monks, serial benefit fraudster Gary Woodcroft evades prosecution by ... joining a monastery. Essentially it's One Flew Over The Nimmo's Nest. Sadly, the torturous proposition isn't backed by anything approaching gilted ribaldry, with a decent cast including Mark Heap and Angus Deayton reduced to delivering insultingly sub-panto fare throughout.

Radio Times review

"New and daring projects" were what comedy exec Shane Allen promised with this season of comedy pilots. This showcase doesn't feel as daring as a sitcom set in a monastery might once have done - when, for instance, a previous version of this project appeared on Radio 2 in 2000 and in an unbroadcast pilot in 2008, long before viewers gave clerical sitcoms their blessing via Rev.

This is worlds away from Rev.; it's a traditional studio sitcom with broad characters and pleasantly cartoony storylines - a bell falling out of a bell tower, drunken monks, and so on. Seann Walsh plays Brother Gary, who fled to the monastery to escape a conviction for benefit fraud. Mark Heap plays the monastery's second-in-charge, a former air traffic controller fuming with pent-up anger, and Justin Edwards looks promising as Brother Bernard, who likes a tipple.

Monks is hard to get Revved up about

Tonight, BBC One airs Monks, a comedy pilot in which Seann Walsh plays benefits cheat Gary who has joined a monastic order in an attempt to evade the fuzz. Co-starring James Fleet as the Abbott and Mark Heap - doing a good Mark Heap - as the Monk who hates Gary it's... it's... well it's OK. But it does seem to smack of a return to the bad old days of religious-based comedy.

Preview: Comedy Playhouse: Monks

It's a relief to say that they probably saved the best until last. They certainly saved the best cast until last.