Quick Cuts

BBC4 veers out of its elegantly upholstered bandwidth and into that of little bro BBC3, with this edge-free but fitfully charming new sitcom set in a hairdresser's. Consummate comedian Doon Mackichan is the demented mother hen, heading a brood of gently dysfunctional tropes. It has a regional theatre feel to it, with all the slack timing and weirdly comforting lack of fashion that entails, but there are some nice lines, particularly when Mackichan reads emotions into sets of breast implants: "Arrogant ... pensive ... regretful somehow."

A skewed new sitcom by Georgia Pritchett, who wrote Life of Riley for BBC1 but is in much saltier, funnier form here. Doon Mackichan is Sue, proprietor of a hair salon where the staff struggle to focus on cutting barnets properly. Foolhardy customers come and go, mostly playing stooges as chaos sets in. The scattergun style and lines like "You just frittered away my boobs on a giant chipmunk" could easily lead to a lack of warm authenticity, but don't: the gang feels real. Tonight, Sue hoovers some Mexican tranquillisers, a comic short cut Mackichan brilliantly exploits.

A hairdresser-comedy from the writer of Life of Riley? Quick Cuts is by no means as bad as that suggests, but nor is it as good as it ought to be. As Desmond's and Cutting It have shown, there's no shortage of potential for laughter or melodrama in a salon, but a combination of peculiar editing and floppy, semi-improvised dialogue mean Quick Cuts takes too long to find its comedic or dramatic rhythm, cutting a decent cast (including Doon Mackichan as the loose cannon proprietor) adrift.

But, once the painstakingly set-up scenarios (blind dates, theft, prescription drug abuse) start to pay off, the performances warm up and the lines get funnier - one customer likens a sexual encounter to 'a seal trying to stay on a rock'. There's still some promise here, but it's a very uneven opener.

Quick Cuts: Confessions from a hairdressers

Writer Georgia Pritchett explains how Quick Cuts is a cross between a sitcom and a sketch show.

Quick Cuts, BBC Four, review

It was semi-improvised, giving it a slightly repertory theatre feel, but there were lots of neat lines.