The Cup

So ogreish are the characters that there's absolutely no point buying into them. If there are moments of heart, they're buried so deep that you basically couldn't care less about what happened to them. The main character (whose name I can't even be bothered to learn) is such a dick, that you find yourself willing ill toward him. It's not that he's a 'bit sad' or 'cares too much'... he's just... a dick. And who really wants to hang around with dicks?

The comic strangeness was prevalent in The Wrong Door, a sketch show that relied heavily on technical and CGI trickery. One very funny sketch featured a group of sprites escaping from a bottle and making a poor drunken fool's life that much more horrible by texting a malicious message to his girlfriend and framing him for watching hotel porn.

One young woman was dating a dinosaur, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, who visits her parents' home and destroys everything within, including eating the family dog. A robot stomps over London asking where it left its house keys, destroying swaths of the metropolis. The show is hit and miss - Superhero Tryouts, an X Factor for wannabe superheroes, was laboured and directionless - but the writers Ben Wheatley and Jack Cheshire (who also direct and produce) have at least originated a novel and bizarre show.

Their strangest creation, and the most brilliantly maddening, is a scientist's unfortunately successful attempt to create a new life form. Somehow a malformed DNA structure means that this creature is the most irritating thing on the planet. The scientists hate it. We hate it. This creature destroys everything it touches, but only after wheedling, pleading and manipulating. Are we there yet? it repeats. Eventually, the guy who took the creature in drove at a post to end it all.

Episode two of this fly-on-the-wall mockumentary about coaching an under-11s football team, and it's still difficult to see its point. If this is just entertainment, then its well-observed dialogue can sometimes make it feel very clever. I can't believe you started a fight in front of the kids, one aspiring coach is told. You don't get anything without a fight in this life, he replies in perfect soccer cliché. But there's the nagging feeling that the writers are striving towards a greater significance - unfortunately, it's unclear what that might be, beyond the truism that adults' behaviour is often more juvenile than that of their children.