Not Going Out

This daft sitcom shouldn't work, given that it centres on someone (er, Lee Mack) whose entire performance relies on shameless one-liners rather than anything much in the way of acting. But its punchlines land with such a devastating ka-pow that this regularly has us in stitches.

It should come as no surprise that Tim Vine once held the world record for telling the most jokes in one hour.

This show seems to be aiming for the record for squeezing the most gags into one sitcom. And on a Friday night, after your brain has clocked off for the weekend and all it wants to do is chuckle foolishly for 30 minutes, then bless its smelly old cotton socks for that.

Tonight, as two pretty lesbians move in down the corridor from Lee and Lucy, we ask can you turn a straight girl gay just by kissing her? But also, how many lesbian jokes do you know? ee Mack knows loads and loads of them and they're all here, packed in tighter than elephants in a mini.

Over on BBC1 at 9.30pm is the brilliantly funny Not Going Out (I know it's just one daft gag after another, but that's the whole point).

Lee Mack Interview

A brief interview with Lee Mack. See our own interview for a more in-depth discussion with the star.

For a sitcom now in its third series, and which has won prestigious, international awards, Not Going Out is peculiarly bad. It comes to something when the most unbelievable part of an episode is not the plot in which Lee (the stand-up Lee Mack who also writes much of the show) became convinced that he'd got his landlady pregnant by sharing her bathwater.

No, that would be their shared flat, supposedly in the middle of London and so huge that it makes the apartments in Friends - which the show would dearly love to be - look like cupboards. What do these people do to afford this? Are they drug dealers, minor royalty, lottery winners?

You're not meant to worry about that, just go with it as they sling insults at each other in strange conversations that are like nothing resembling the way actual people talk. And actual people don't constantly address each other standing in the middle of a room, arms hanging at their sides. The more it goes on, the more fascinating it becomes. Someone enters, someone else immediately walks over to stand parallel to them, delivering puns in turns until the scene is over, then they do it again. You know who actually does have conversations like this? People on stage, which is where Not Going Out is filmed, in front of a live studio audience, who are in hysterics. I think you really had to be there.

Series three of the one BBC1 sitcom we like got off to a rather unremarkable start. There was the usual sprinkling of fine one-liners and the lovely aerial shots of London (oh look, there's our house) and Tim Vine's Tim was as wonderfully pompous as ever. However, Lee Mack's Lee is normally so lovable, but this week he was just annoyingly idiotic, worrying that he'd made flatmate Lucy pregnant ("got a muffin in the breadbin") because she shared the bathwater he'd ejaculated into during a relaxing wank. The weakness of this show was at the forefront: poor storylines.

Most sitcoms have done away with a studio audience but Not Going Out remains touchingly old-fashioned. If you're used to the natural feel of Gavin & Stacey or Outnumbered, it takes a few moments to acclimatise to the studio lights and set-up/gag/set-up/gag rhythms of Not Going Out, but it's worth it: the jokes are lovingly crafted and nobody could accuse Lee Mack of not knowing how to deliver a zinger. Mack plays hopeless big-kid Lee, whose long-held crush on his landlady Lucy isn't helped by the fact that she is the sister of his best friend, Tim (Tim Vine). Tonight's opener for series three undermines the trad format with a gleefully off-colour, not to say X-rated, storyline: Lucy thinks she's pregnant and Lee is worried he may have helped get her that way, although exactly how doesn't bear too much thinking about.

Lee Mack's sitcom about an amiable drifter infatuated with his beautiful landlady is back for a third series, and it still has a lot going for it. The characters are still likeable; the relationships are well defined and many of the quickfire gags hit the spot. But, for all its qualities, it is difficult nowadays to enjoy a comedy that relies on the bullying sound of laughter. It feels as though the viewer is being nagged and prodded by a manic nanny: "This a joke! Laugh at this!" It is worse than unnecessary - it spoils it.

Lee Mack returns for a new series as the wise-cracking lodger who seems to have nothing better to do than make fun of the cleaner and hang out with his landlady's brother.

Apart from the inconvenient fact that Lee Mack isn't gay, Not Going Out almost reminds you of a British Will And Grace. The rat-a-tat gags and setup of unlikely flatmates might be as artificially manufactured and as full of dodgy additives as a market stall hamburger, but you can't get enough of it.

As series three opens tonight, Lee is pondering the urban myth about whether it's possible for a woman to get pregnant from bath water. Why? Well, his landlady Lucy (Sally Bretton) is mysteriously up the duff and there can only be one, disgusting, explanation. As Lee and best mate Tim (Tim Vine) consider the grim implications, the jokes come from all directions. Plus, we discover another reason why Lee is so keen to stay in the flat. Never mind that he fancies Lucy - the bathroom is amazing.