Pete Versus Life

Pete Versus Life unlikely to return, say reports

Rafe Spall sitcom Pete Versus Life is unlikely to return to Channel 4, according to reports in Broadcast.

The second season of Pete's ongoing grudge match with life ends tonight as he has a close encounter with a girl who passionately believes in aliens and UFOs.

Tilly (Georgia Maguire) is bonkers, obviously, but could actually be Pete's perfect girl - one who's almost gullible enough to believe some of his lies.

But Pete has other plans as he finds out his old flame Chloe has started seeing his arch-nemesis Jake.

Commentators Colin and Terry have been on a course about how women are people too. Not so you'd notice though.

And while no animals were harmed in the making of this episode for a change, a 12-year-old footballer ends up in traction.

So has the show got legs for a third series? Thanks to the likeable Rafe Spall, and Colin and Terry's crass brilliance, we hope so.

With the possible exception of Tom Hollander and his Rev cohorts, there isn't a better comic performer on TV right now than Rafe Spall. He makes magic with fairly ordinary scripts, adding his own tics, double- takes and whimpers (I LOVE Pete's whimpers) and his very own brand of appealing hopelessness.

So it's a pity this is the last in the current series, though it goes out on a great final two minutes as Pete implodes when witnessing a marriage proposal. This is after he goes out with a half-witted UFO believer called Tilly. And after he goads then picks a fight with a street performer who pretends to be a robot. I'm going to miss you, Pete. You prize berk.

We've noted Rafe Spall's appalling track record with family pets before now, so it should come as no surprise when Pete opens the batting tonight by running over a moggy called Monty.

But is he going to let a little detail like that stop him from copping off with Monty's pretty female owner, Mel? Of course not.

Pete's massive lie this week involves pretending to be a military hero. That's a hard trick to pull off, but the most convincing acting on screen this week is actually from a dog called Gary.

Gary is the only one who knows what really happened to Monty and if looks could kill, Pete would be dog-food.

As our favourite commentators Colin and Terry explain, it's rare for a dog and cat to be friends, "but they found enough common ground in their dislike of birds to make the relationship work."

Craven Pete, professional disaster and romantic failure, runs over a woman's cat, which gives him the perfect opportunity to try to get off with the grieving pet-owner.

This, like every single one of Pete's potential assignations, could bomb horribly when it comes to laughs, but Rafe Spall is so endearing as pin-brained Pete (he's a halfwit, but he's not malicious) that it just works.

It's a delight, too, to know that everything will always go badly wrong, despite Pete's best efforts and Olympian lies.

For all its obvious prat-falls, this sitcom has a really light touch, and once again tonight it manages to pull off the kind of Curb Your Enthusiasm-ish ­situation that Lead Balloon always strained for and missed.

We know that by the end of each episode Pete will have lost a girl, been caught out in a lie, publicly humiliated and exposed as the vain waste of that he is.

If Sigmund Freud were alive today he'd be wheeling Pete out on talk shows as a living, breathing, visual aid to illustrate the id - that part of our personality that's all childlike, selfish urges and no common sense.

Conspiring tonight to trip Pete up are a beautiful philosophy student, a second-hand leather jacket, and a performance of Mamma Mia! Any normal person would be able to take these ingredients and turn them into something quite nice. But watching Pete snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - yet again - is even more satisfying.

Work is so thin on the ground for journalist Pete (Rafe Spall) in the third episode of this run of the clever sports sitcom that he's working in a chicken packing factory. But then a newspaper accepts his article criticising Lottie Beaumont, Britain's seventh best tennis player - the problem is she's his girlfriend.

Pete (Rafe Spall) has yet to open his score-sheet, while Life is about to thump another ­hat-trick in the back of the net.

This week, Chloe, his ex-­girlfriend from season one, (the one whose family are all into saving the planet) has decided she wants to get back with him - just as Pete's dad turns up with his suitcase after a tiff with his wife.

Pete's goal in life is breathtakingly simple.

All he wants is to have sex whenever possible, but his habit of saying the worst possible thing to the most ­inappropriate person at the wrong time gets in the way. Like Pete himself, this ­­sitcom is silly, crude and ­unsophisticated, but hard to dislike and even his whiny, whimpering, snivelly voice kind of grows on you.

The clever bits are the ­incidental on-screen ­stats, where we learn, for example, that Chloe's dad once ­resuscitated Pete Doherty.

It's hard not to like this, and believe me I've tried. But Rafe Spall is great at the whimpering, socially inept halfwit whose every action is fodder for a couple of sports commentators.

Tonight, Pete's dad (the great Philip Jackson) fetches up at Pete's house, saying he's left Pete's mum. Nothing of what follows is subtle, but it has just enough charm to keep you watching. There are some good asides about rip-off local shops and their paranoid owners and an unkind dig at Mick Hucknall.

Pete isn't doing very well in Pete Versus Life. You'd probably have to say that, on balance, life was winning. Pete wanted to be a sports journalist in the first series, remember? Now he's going for a job as a dog walker.

He gets the job, but it doesn't go well. On their first outing, Glynn, a lovely yellow labrador, is flattened on the London north circular. Things look up briefly when Gracja, his parents' new Polish helper, tells Pete she's going to "how you say, screw your brains". But even that doesn't go to plan - ie happen.

It's fairly standard kind of sitcom fodder. Except for the fact that there are two sports pundits doing a running commentary on Pete's life. As if it was a sports event. And that lifts it, turns it into something quite imaginative and original. It's the kind of idea you can imagine creators George Jeffries and Bert Tyler-Moore coming up with over a beer or two, thinking "genius", then sleeping on it and having serious doubts in the morning - like why would sports commentators be commentating on some bloke's life?

Someone had the courage to commission it, though. Viewers like it: enough watched for this second series to happen. I like it, too. It works, weirdly. And Rafe Spall is nice as Pete. A bit hopeless, but likable. He would be really, being Timothy Spall's son. Hasn't dentistry improved, though, in just one generation?