Pramface

Pramface, BBC3's new comedy, wants to be The Inbetweeners so much it hurts. It features two callow schoolboys and, a minor twist, a female friend who is superior to both in wit and wisdom and carries a secret torch for the male lead, Jamie. But Jamie hasn't noticed and so, after crashing a post-exam party, loses his virginity to Laura, in a sequence that struck me as being overly generous to those who might get their kicks from watching teenagers have orgasms. If it really was Jamie's first time I doubt that it would have lasted long enough for the montage sequence here, in which his impressively extended gurnings were intercut with the masturbatory grimaces of his friend Michael and Beth's attempts to get out of the room without being noticed. The point of the thing is that posh, sophisticated Laura finds herself pregnant with gauche, ordinary Jamie's baby, so last night was really just a kind of sitcom artificial insemination. But the young actors play it nicely and the script has its moments. "I have to let the women come to me and slightly ignore them... like the horse whisperer," says Michael, whose confidence in his powers of seduction turns out to be wildly misplaced.

Pramface review

It looks and feels a little like The Inbetweeners with a pregnancy plot plopped in to keep things moving, but the fact that Pramface is genuinely funny in its own right should see those possibly unfair comparisons slowly fall by the wayside.

Pramface was bound to disappoint, and it did

Any show pitched as "the new" something is bound to be a disappointment. Only the most successful shows are followed by their very own "the new"s, so the comparisons between BBC Three's new sitcom Pramface and two leading forebears, Gavin and Stacey and The Inbetweeners, may have raised expectations to an unsustainable level.

Pramface: Playing the pregnant teenager

Scarlett Alice Johnson who plays Laura Derbyshire in BBC Three sitcom Pramface, talks about playing a pregnant teenager.

Bucking the usual BBC3 trend for hand-to-mouth budgets and scruffy single sets, this has a massive cast, gorgeous houses you'll want to nick decorating tips off and its low-level smut is cushioned by some genuinely LOL-worthy moments.

Setting its stall midway between the cringe comedy of The Inbetweeners and too-cool-for-school Skins, it stars two ex-EastEnders: Scarlett Alice Johnson, who you definitely won't recognise as Vicki Fowler, and Emer Kenny (minus Zsa Zsa's blue hair extensions and stroppiness) who you probably will, as well as newcomer Yasmin Paige.

On the boys' team are Dylan Edwards and Sean Michael Verey.

I could tell you which pair of teens end up expecting a baby by the end of this episode, but that would spoil the surprise.

A second series has already been commissioned. Quite right, too.

At first, this new comedy goes through the motions with a depressing lack of imagination. Its main characters - nice virgin; crass, gawky, showboating virgin; swotty PC girl who secretly loves nice virgin; posh, bright girl who's rebelling against her parents - are archetypes from American films, unaltered. Real teens are a lot more diverse, and funny.

But the title tells you this is a set-up episode. The booze-fuelled fumble in the middle will spawn a baby. Can Pramface step up and grow up? Someone thinks so, because they've splashed out on Anna Chancellor and Angus Deayton as the parents at war. And the young actors are blameless. Pramface could still recover from its inauspicious start.

For the time being, all irreverent teen comedies are doomed to be compared to The Inbetweeners. This new series offers a neat twist on the formula of social awkwardness, inebriation and putative cherry-popping by cautioning its gawky heroes to be careful what they wish for. Things are going impossibly well for 16-year-old Jamie as he punches well above his weight at a drunken summer party. But what might the consequences be of his unlikely one-night stand? This series will have to be careful to find the right tone - knockabout adolescent debauchery might sit uneasily with the issues Pramface is looking to explore. And we'd like to think it will avoid simple, moralistic answers to what, in the real world, are always tough questions. But this is a reasonably promising start.

BBC3 is a bit hit and miss with its sitcoms but this one is well worth catching. It focuses on two bewildered teens who get more than they bargain for after a drunken entanglement at a party.

Pramface review: Must grow up fast

Pramface turned out to be half-way decent, not good you understand, but serviceable. It's like an amalgamation of every youth show you've ever seen.

In Pramface (BBC3) a potentially clunky premise - two teenagers' drunken sex at a party leads to a pregnancy neither is ready for - is saved by cunning casting and a funny script. Sean Verey as 16-year-old father-to-be Jamie has scarcely lost his puppy fat, while as 18-year-old mother-to-be Laura, Scarlett Alice Johnson looks and plays like a young Harriet Walter - as hard as nails in dealing with her convincingly useless parents (Angus Deayton and Anna Chancellor), yet as brittle as pressed flowers with everyone else. I loved Jamie's loser friend's hopeless sex playlist - 50 Cent followed by the Top Gear theme tune. Although Chris Reddy's plot is full of holes (would Laura, after discovering she's pregnant, really make her first phone call to the shag buddy whose face she can't recall?) there is enough in this too-much-too-young comedy's opening episode to justify a second date.