Off The Hook

Stay tuned for Off the Hook, a new sitcom about the shenanigans of a batch of university freshers. It's rather like an episode of The Inbetweeners you wouldn't mind your nan seeing.

The latter was, while still not riotously funny, better. Off the Hook follows Danny and his fat, ginger friend Shane as they start their first term at university. Laugh-out-loud moments were rare, but like its cast it had charm and a certain vulnerability. It captured the energy and the desperate importance and immediacy of everything that is the hallmark of Freshers' Week. I wanted to reach into the screen and tell them: "Enjoy it while you can, kids. It's all downhill from here." If you don't believe it, well, you don't know Dick.

Quite a shift of gear turning over to BBC3 for their brand new university-themed sitcom, Off the Hook, aimed, presumably, at those school leavers about to start their first year of academia. It's offered as part of the Corporation's youthful "Switch" brand, though in reality has little in common with its other vibrant radio and TV offerings, which owe most of their success to the individual talent of the presenters. It's amusing enough - there are plenty of references sure to raise a smile (the posh gap-year kid, the noisy neighbour, the nightmare flatmate) - though probably not as amusing as the local pub's student happy hour. A little too tame, too written-by-adults, to tempt the Skins generation, I suspect. But we'll see.

Off The Hook Episode 1 Review

Comparisons to The Inbetweeners are unavoidable, not helped by Off The Hook's decision to cast someone from that show in a prominent role (James Buckley); and, while I'll argue that this comedy's university setting is more alluring than Inbetweener's dull Sixth Form, it's tamer and less funny...

Has the world had a collective loss of short-term memory or did The Office never happen? If it hadn't then the clowns on Lunch Monkeys might just about have got away with it. But it did and they don't. Xeroxing Ricky Gervais's face and sticking it on my plasma screen would have been quicker and funnier.

I'll be brief because it makes me weary just thinking about it but the set-up is this: it's a comedy in an office. It's full of people who are either bored or stupid. Actually they're mostly bored and stupid. There's an Asian idiot called Asif, an English slapper called Tania and a lovelorn, long-haired streak of photocopy paper called Kenny, thus ensuring a generous range of gender and ethnic groups are duly insulted.

Somewhere hiding in the back office, praying he doesn't get many lines, sniffing his Chariots Of Fire shorts and wondering how, how, how did it come to this is Nigel Havers and it's here that Lunch Monkeys achieves the impossible: it makes you feel sorry for Nigel Havers. How did he wind up as the boss of a personal injury law firm in a sitcom which constitutes a crime against comedy? His hair is still lovely and floppy and everything.

The material in this perky comedy about university freshers, based on an online series, doesn't exactly zing with ingenuity. In fact there's something endearingly old-fashioned about the social faux-pas, intense conversations, antisocially loud music and disastrous parties. The films Starter for 10 and The Sure Thing have already been there. But the show's energy and the actors' confident playing somehow make it fly. Though it focuses on embarrassed Danny, we also meet his slacker mate Shane, depressed Keith and feisty Scarlet.

See The Inbetweeners? BBC3 certainly did. James Buckley, who was the brilliantly vile Jay in that series, plays one of a group of students in their first year at university, and he is far from the only debt this new sitcom owes to that programme. Off The Hook was initially some sort of online youth web TV thing, which obviously sounds ghastly, but the BBC are naturally jolly pleased with themselves for this sort of inclusive, participatory, cross-platform bullsh1t. Whatever. Surely the only two questions you need for a sitcom are "Is it well-written?" and "Is it well-acted?" The answers are "Not really" and "Quite well", but tvBite will give it a go out of love for the Bus W@nker.