Sirens

Sirens, Monday 10pm, Channel 4

After (relative) successes like Teachers and No Angels, Sirens is the latest Channel 4 comedy drama to point the spotlight on people with important jobs who may not always be as professional as we'd hope. However, this tale of cheeky paramedics was pretty much dead on arrival.

'Sirens' sound with 1.6m on Channel 4

Channel 4's Sirens opened with 1.6 million viewers on Monday evening, while ITV1 documentary Babies Behind Bars captivated 3.7m, the latest audience data has revealed.

Comedy-drama Sirens hit the ground running, introducing its trio of protagonist paramedics at a particularly bloody and destructive road traffic accident. Wildly improvising, and in contravention of all medical protocols, the series' narrator Stuart performs open heart massage and saves the life of a passenger.

The hospital counsellor warns them to expect violent mood swings following such an intense adrenaline rush, a syndrome Stuart dismisses as "Up, Horny, Down", thoughtfully providing episode one with its title.

It was an incredibly exciting set up, but the writer got irretrievably stuck on the horny part of his theme, sending our priapic paramedics into a world of instantly accessible casual sex, cavorting like Robin Askwiths at a Confessions Of retrospective. That one of the trio is actively and enthusiastically gay provides the only concession to the passage of time.

The show's potential had evaporated by the second ad break, leaving behind a tiresome, immature and emotionally dishonest lads' mag, macho fantasy. Even the supposedly plain policewoman is played by a patently attractive actress.

Created by Brian Fillis and inspired by paramedic Brian Kellett's blog and subsequent book, Sirens has a slightly stylised, "written" air about it, but once you adjust to that, this six-part comedy-drama is a treat. In tonight's opener, we meet Stuart, Rachid and Ashley, three paramedics who would seem like sorry specimens of 21st-century British manhood if they weren't performing heroic frontline services on the drunken streets of West Yorkshire. After a dramatic opening, a counsellor advises them to be prepared for the emotional rollercoaster of an adrenaline rush, horniness, then depression, but Stuart is determined to be "master of my own biology".

It started life in 2003 as a blog by London ambulance technician Brian Kellett.

Back then, his musings on the job were entitled Random Acts of Reality. It became a book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, a radio play and now it's been turned into a TV series.

Even before it's aired here in Britain, an American version is already in the ­pipeline.

Written by Tony Basgallop, (Teachers, Hotel Babylon) this comedy drama is a strangely ­schizophrenic production.

On the one hand it seems to be straining to be a rude Channel 4 sitcom, filled with the usual quota of very bad language and sex scenes both gay and straight.

The opening line, "One female, mid-20s, looks like a slightly older Miley Cyrus...", played out against the medical drama cliche of slo-mo heroes and a lush ballad on the soundtrack, certainly leads you to expect the rest of the episode to be just as funny.

But it's also got a psychology ­textbook in its back pocket plus a brain and a conscience - three things that get in the way of comedy.

Our trio of paramedics, Stuart, Ashley and Rachid, played by Rhys Thomas, Richard Madden and Kayvan Novak, have attended a bad ­road-traffic accident and have been sent for counselling.

Warned of the mood swings that adrenaline coursing through their bodies will cause, Stuart decides to fight it - just to prove that he's more than a bunch of chemical reactions.

How much of tonight's first episode is based on real life is debatable, but it you want to wade through eight years of blogs to find out, then by all means, be my guest.

Sirens is a dire, dreary sitcom about three spectacularly charmless ambulance drivers.

Rhys Thomas of Bellamy's People and Fonejacker's Kayvan Novak are able comic performers, but they're all at sea in this virtually jokeless cauldron of mediocrity.

With its unedifying mix of crass sex jokes, gruesome imagery and ham-fisted "pathos", it's a tonal train-wreck. It's also stretched to breaking point at an hour, when its barren dialogue and slim plot (lazily derived from Seinfeld's infamous masturbation episode) couldn't sustain even half that time. If you're a young male who finds the very idea of turgidity amusing, knock yourself out. Otherwise, run for the hills.

Brrraapp. Can you hear the sirens coming? This is a clever Dizzee Rascal reference, that doesn't mean much but allows us to mention that Sirens can be added to the long list of TV shows that fail to use pop tunes that could have been created for their themes. Despite that Sirens is utterly brilliant. From the moment that Gary Bellamy begins his sweary narration (and turns off Angry Anderson to the final scene, it's terrific.

Billed comedy drama, which makes it sound like Cold Feet, it's about three people who work as paramedics and it's as dark as it gets, with humour that you imagine gets them through the awful mess that they work in the driving force. It's sweary, fun, sexy and bizarre. If we're splitting hairs, Gary Bellamy's performance is so understated it barely feels like he's there and Kayvan Novak still feels like he could be the best comic actor of his generation, if he just got on with it (stop dicking about with Facejacker Novak). But these are quibbles so minor, they're barely little quibblets. Just watch it.

Sirens: Is it worth taking yet another trip to A&E?

Channel 4's new hospital comedy shows promise - but do we need any more programmes set in medical surroundings?

Radio Times review

I love black comedies. The bleaker and the more tasteless, the better. The Thick of It, Pulling, Getting On, Nurse Jackie. So Sirens, a "comedy drama" based on real-life paramedic Tom Reynolds's blog, looked alluring. Bring on the gallows humour!

It turns out to be a queasy mixture of sentimentality and sexism, spattered with the kind of knuckle-dragging gags last seen in Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

Example: a sexy gas-meter reader has to reach for her ID, which just happens to be tucked in her inside pocket, right near her ample, exposed cleavage. Come on, that kind of thing was dated in 1973.

I have no idea who Sirens, which follows three young male paramedics, is aimed at. Definitely not teens; they don't have the patience. Young men? Maybe; there are gags about erections and masturbation, and the weariest, most aged visual "joke" about a certain sex act that is so spent it's a museum piece.

But then maybe it's aimed at old men. Or tree frogs. Or Pekinese dogs. Who knows? But it should be better. It should be funnier. It should be sharper. It's unforgivable.

Sirens looked promising on paper. Based on Tom Reynolds's popular blog, Random Acts of Reality, which wryly chronicled his time as an emergency response technician in the London Ambulance service, it stars three decent young actors - Rhys Thomas (from Bellamy's People), Kayvan Novak (Chris Morris's film Four Lions) and Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) - as cynical, laddish paramedics striving to treat their often harrowing work as just another day at the office. Unfortunately, it turns out to be one of those comedy-dramas that is neither funny nor dramatic. It combines Green Wing's irritating air of unreality with Skins's desperation to appear edgy, meaning that the banter just doesn't ring true, while the tediously frequent sexual encounters are even less believable.