Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant: A comedy of errors on Sky 1

What would Shakespeare make of our modern comedy of errors, Mount Pleasant?

Sarah Hooper's series about the perky goings on in a recession-untroubled Mancunian suburb is billed as comedy drama, as if to suggest you're getting two things for the price of one, but in truth it's short on both, unless you count hackneyed sexual intrigue as drama and affected, sub-Coronation Street dialogue as comedy. It's comfort telly, relying on a cast of familiar faces including Pauline Collins, Tommy Ball, Angela Griffin and Sally Lindsay as Lisa, whose over-indulgent lunches lead to speculation that she is pregnant.

When a secretary wrongly assumes Lisa is pregnant, the good news is broadcast around the cul de sac quicker than you can say: I'm just a bit tubby. Her thrilled parents - played by a deliciously batty Pauline Collins and Bobby Ball - are soon banning Lisa from eating cream cheese ("do you want your baby to be born with pigeon feet?") to her and hubby Dan's utter mystification. Meanwhile, Shelley decides that her biological clock is also ticking ...

It's a giggle. Unfortunately, Mount Pleasant isn't content to be a farce and the scenes that strive to be more sentimental fall flat. Watching Lisa and Dan in the bath, swigging wine and singing along to Oasis's Live Forever, you can't help wishing Collins and Ball would pop in with a dopey gag.

Mount Pleasant was being touted as the new middle-class Shameless comedy-drama. It failed on every count. No laughs, no drama, no edge. All it had going for it was suspense: the mystery of how it got commissioned in the first place.

Mount Pleasant review

Given that Mount Pleasant is written by Sarah Hooper who cut her teeth on Shameless, you might expect some rough-edged, raucous comedy to emerge from this bog-standard sitcom. You'd be wrong.

Mount Pleasant review

But truth be told, on the strength of the first episode alone, I feel a tad disappointed.

Review: Mount Pleasant (Sky1)

Hot on the heels of their supermarket sitcom Trollied comes Mount Pleasant, confirming Sky believe warm northern charm and familiar settings are key to attracting big audiences. There's little we haven't seen before in this middle-class suburban comedy: a temptress neighbour, an eccentric dad, a dippy work colleague, an inattentive boyfriend, the unlikely chick magnet husband-name your cliché, it's probably here.

A suburban tale evidently shooting for a Desperate Housewives-style comedy-drama angle, Mount Pleasant seems to have decided that comedy is what you create when you combine the cliche with the offensive. Even Sky's habit of throwing money at the problem can't make things right, as a fine cast of well-liked British actors (Angela Griffin, Sally Lindsay, Bobby Ball - the only good element here) try to lift the diabolical material. And the whole thing is made still worse by jarring shifts in tone.

The sight of Bianca (Sian Reeves playing yet another over-the-top maneater like in Cutting It and Emmerdale) ­highlights the obvious ingredients chucked into this new sitcom.

And that's before we meet Sue (Pauline Collins) who arrives with a cry of "Only me!" and Barry (Bobby Ball).

On the other hand, it's a cut above Candy Cabs, filmed nearby, although that's not saying much.

For Mount Pleasant, read upmarket Hale in Cheshire, home to Lisa and husband Dan - played by Sally Lindsay and Daniel Ryan.

In the first instalment, Lisa fears Dan has forgotten their 10th anniversary and fumes when gorgeous boss/friend (Angela Griffin) moves in and goes about dressed like she's doing a cover shoot for Nuts

The cast also includes Liza Tarbuck and Ainsley Howard and you get a vision of the casting director throwing a big net into a pool marked: The Usual Suspects.

Fairly happily married Lisa (Sally Lindsay) lives in suburban Manchester close to her nearest and dearest. She can barely pucker her lips for a kiss from hubby Dan (Daniel Ryan), let alone roll up her sleeves for a scrap with him, without her dotty parents, airhead best mate or brassy boss interrupting.

It's like an upmarket Shameless - on which writer Sarah Hooper cut her teeth - but the characters are even broader. Still, this first episode rattles along pleasantly enough, as a paranoid Lisa frets that Dan has forgotten their tenth anniversary. It's when her boss temporarily moves in, having chucked a feckless boyfriend, that the fun and games really begin.