The Fun Police

The third pilot in the Comedy Showcase series, The Fun Police is a studio based sitcom (featuring live laughter, to the shock and mortification of professional TV critics) about an inept health and safety department.

It's a more traditional sitcom in the style of shows like The IT Crowd, albeit with more unusually daft humour. The pilot sees Leslie (Rhys Derby) taking over as head of health and safety in the town of Brightsea after one of his work colleges, Neil (Jack Doolan), put their boss in a coma after accidentally falling on top of her.

The best way to describe The Fun Police is that it's 'enjoyably silly'. Leslie, for example, instead of coming up with a press statement about the accident spends his time ordering new furniture and designing a new mascot to make health and safety more fun. Another character, Toni (Katy Wix - who seems to be in at least one Channel 4 pilot per week at the moment) is an over-zealous officer with a robotic hand, paranoid about the dangers of the sea and helium balloons. This pilot also featured a cameo from Vic Reeves (credited under his real name Jim Moir) as an egotistical town planner driven mad by the power to name streets.

The Fun Police is full of ideas and is certainly a fun show. Not every joke is a cracker, but it certainly made me laugh and I for one would think it would make a good series if given the chance.

Comedy Showcase: The Fun Police review

They remain unfashionable since The Office blazed its trail, but I'm still partial to multi-camera sitcoms recorded with a live studio audience. I won't bore you with exactly why this is so (most of you will know), but suffice to say they can feel more inclusive and theatrical than single-camera comedies striving for realism. The Fun Police is a very traditional sitcom, with a strong workplace backdrop, full of promising comic actors, but I struggled with it more than I expected to.

Fans of Flight of the Conchords will be very pleased to see the band's inept manager Murray (Rhys Darby[/o]) starring in this new pilot that could have been written especially for him.

He plays Leslie, head of a team of health and safety inspectors, and his blend of naive enthusiasm and shocking ideas are pure Murray.

The Fun Police was written by Matt Morgan, who was Russell Brand's straight-man sidekick on his BBC Radio 2 and there are a lot of very funny ideas in this.

I especially like Katy Wix as an inspector obsessed with shutting down the sea on safety grounds. She does have a point.

Vic Reeves is in it, too, as a town planner, although for some reason he looks like he's come as Keith Lemon and he's credited by his real name of Jim Moir.

Commission a series of this one please, Channel 4 people. I'd like to see more.

If you're still laughing at the memory of Rob Brydon and Nick Hewer sharing an orange cuddle jumper last week, tune in tonight for some more fibbing fun.

David Mitchell's mate Robert Webb joins the panel tonight and would have us believe he once had so many imaginary friends they formed a gang.

Also on David's team is Sir Terry Wogan, with totally absurd stories that might or might not be true. Either way, he enjoys himself telling them.

It's almost impossible NOT to grin like an idiot all the way through as everyone is having such a good time. But it's in the cross-examination where this show really takes off.

It seems that inside every panellist is a barrister dying to get out and if the comedy thing ever dries up, somewhere out there is a horsehair wig with Lee Mack's name on it.

Katy Wix, Kevin Bridges and host Rob Brydon join in tonight's gleeful grilling.

This new sitcom pilot about a small-town health and safety team comes from the people behind The IT Crowd and Ash Atalla, who produced The Office. It has elements of both shows: it's loud, bright, brash and has an almost hysterical laughter track, plus there's a David Brent-like figure played by Flight Of The Conchords' Rhys Darby, looking like something out of the 1970s. Fun, in a bulldozing kind of way.

Silliness abounds in writer Matt Morgan and director Richard Boden's pilot set in the offices of an accident-prone health and safety team. Rhys Darby, familiar as the dense manager Murray in Flight of the Conchords, hams it up to the max as the still more OTT office manager, Leslie. Katy Wix and Jack Doolan are good in support. It's hard to see where it can go in sitcom terms as there's barely enough material to fill this 30 minutes, but fans of knockabout comedy may find more to please.

The Fun Police recording report

Yup, a new studio-based sitcom - although billing it as a Vic Reeves-led vehicle turned out to be quite misleading. Despite taking over 3 hours to film this 30-minute pilot, I'd wager that Reeves would probably appear on-screen for less than 4 minutes.