The Job Lot

Sean Pertwee guest stars this week as an army sergeant drumming up new recruits from among the jobseekers - and having a hot man in uniform in their midst gets the entire staff in a bit of a tizz.

Manager Trish (Sarah Hadland) is making gooey eyes at him, Karl (Russell Tovey) wants to be his new best friend, security guard Paul (Martin Marquez) is put out that he's no longer the manliest man there, and Angela is doing something suggestive with a breadstick.

In her head this is probably seductive but to everybody else it's just disturbing.

Comedian Jo Enright is wonderful again this week as office oddball Angela, and on the receiving end of her unhelpful behaviour tonight is the boss from C4's PhoneShop.

Actor Martin Trenaman plays an estate agent looking for new employment.

Sadly he doesn't want to work in mobile phone retail, but he does spend an awful lot of time on a landline.

Everyone's dander is up in week two of this finely observed character piece. To boost figures at Brownall Job Centre, frazzled manager Trish calls in the Army. Sgt Steve Fox (Sean Pertwee) sets up a recruitment stand but only attracts the attention of the staff. Alarming Angela wants to bed him, Karl thinks he'll be a cool new mate, while Trish's ardour leads to an embarrassing entanglement in the ladies.

Now in his late 40s, Pertwee commands the screen like his dad Jon once did, and should be on TV more often (I'm not counting his wall-to-wall voice-work on adverts and docs).

The Job Lot is a second sitcom premiere from ITV, airing directly after Vicious. This is quite a different beast: an ensemble cast (featuring names such as Sarah Hadland, Russell Tovey and Jo Enright), filmed single-camera, focused around the employees of a West Midlands Job Centre.

The Job Lot is filmed in a style which will be reminiscent to most viewers of modern sitcoms (in particular, The Office), right down to the slight focus readjustments on closeups. This is a bit of an odd one, as the style feels at odds with the writing, which didn't feel as real as the environment we were being shown. The main failing of the opening episode though, was that it focused too heavily on background and not enough on laughs. I counted actually laughing only twice, and they were just the 'light expulsion of air' sort of chuckles rather than actual belly laughs. In its defence, one trapping that is doesn't fall into is demonising the unemployed and 'lower' classes in that familiar way that a lot of mainstream comedy tends towards.

I will give the next episode a go; it wasn't awful but I'm certainly yet to be impressed. I might just watch more for Hannah off Hollyoaks. I like Hannah off Hollyoaks.

The Job Lot is slightly better [than Vicious] but still no great shakes. Once again, from Jo Enright's thwarted office shrew Angela to Russell Tovey's charmingly gormless Carl, it's the performances that save the day. The job centre setting is used to making a few sneakily pertinent points about targets culture and the disregarded human implications of unemployment - tonight featuring the always-amusing Martin Trenaman as an estate agent who baulks at commuting six hours a day to work in a bar. But otherwise, it's a simple workplace comedy recast for the austerity age.

Hard on the heels of ­Vicious's tasselled loafers and completing an ITV comedy double-bill is The Job Lot. 
Don't know about you but that title makes me think of 
The Rag Trade, a sitcom even older than '73. And listen to the theme music - Bring Me Sunshine, the song which Mike and Bernie Winters made their own (just checking you're ­paying attention; it was of course Cheech & Chong). But in fact The Job Lot has a contemporary look (so long as you don't think that jittery Office-esque camerawork is getting quite dated) and an apt setting given these times (a job ­centre).

In the finest ITV traditions, this show has plucked talent from successful comedies (­Sarah Hadland from Miranda, Russell Tovey from Him & Her) and tried to create a new winning team. It's a formula borrowed from football but it doesn't always work at Chelsea and Manchester City and it doesn't always work on telly. The Job Lot isn't bad, just a bit predictable. There's the neurotic boss, the punctilious tyrant, the sweet old bat, the chancer running his own business in work-time and the bright but demotivated lad who perks up when the mini-­skirted temp arrives­. Actually, reminding myself of the characters has made me think I should give this another look. I'd do the same for Vicious but in its case would require some '73-style inducement, such as a year's supply of Creamola Foam (raspberry flavour).

The Job Lot, set in a West Midlands Job Centre, was really rather loveable. Russell Tovey as a beleaguered dole-claim clerk, Sarah Hadland as his anxious boss, plus an ensemble cast featuring an anally retentive toxic pen-pusher (Jo Enright, one of Britain's best character actresses), the long-term professionally idle Sophie McShera (Downton Abbey) plus the glorious Adeel Akhtar (Four Lions and Utopia). Russell Tovey's delightful "stick your job up your arse" strop, followed a mere 10 minutes later by a complete volte-face genuinely made me gleeful. In fact, I could watch Sophie McShera argue with Russell Tovey about why she can't take any of the jobs on offer for the entire episode. Tovey: "Greggs, the bakery, 15 hours a week?" McShera: "I'm wheat-intolerant".

If Vicious was a throwback - or homage - to 1970s sitcom, complete with its numbing laughter track, then The Job Lot was by contrast a thoroughly modern confection, all faux-naturalistic acting, mundane setting - a job centre - and no laughter track. There was an obvious debt to The Office, but it's Twenty Twelve that it most resembled in tone and humour.

Jobcentres are funny, in the sense of strange, places. The one I used to frequent in the early 1980s featured the serial killer Dennis Nilsen on its staff. It's not easy to work that scenario into a sitcom, I grant you, but you take my point: there's a quality that's not quite right about them, perhaps owing to the well-founded suspicion that they are the very last place you'd go to find a job.

The opener for The Job Lot didn't capture that weirdness, but it did have some sharpish observations on modern working manners. The best gag concerned the absurdity of phones taking precedence over physical presence as one of the staff, surly Angela (Jo Enright), insisted that a customer in front of her call to book an appointment. When he took out his mobile and did just that, she answered and told him to hold, then looked up and explained that mobile phones were not allowed in the jobcentre.

Nothing else worked as neatly as that. Most sitcoms require a central comic presence and, while Vicious has at least one too many, The Job Lot didn't appear to have one. That may change once the situation has been properly established. It may even start to get funny.

Though I didn't enjoy Vicious, I found that its companion piece The Job Lot had a lot to offer. Set in the West Midlands-based Brownhill Job Centre this focused on the staff and clients neither of whom particularly wanted to work.

Our hero of sorts is Karl (Russell Tovey) a young man who imagined he'd have a successful career after he got his art degree but has found himself working in a job he hates. He is constantly frustrated by trying to find work for people like Bryony (Sophie McShera) who blatantly don't want a job and just turn up so they can keep claiming benefits.

In this first episode Karl briefly quits the Job Centre only to return when he discovers that pretty temp Chloe (Emma Rigby) is due to start working there. However this new incentive is a short-lived one after he finds out that Chloe has a boyfriend and also that she'll be leaving after Danielle (Tamla Kari) returns from maternity leave early. Meanwhile manager Trish (Sarah Hadland) is irked by the return of Angela (Jo Enright) who took Trish to court after she fired her. It now appears as if Angela will be doing as little work as possible while Trish continues to head towards an inevitable breakdown.

While The Job Lot is far from perfect I found it to be well-observed with a couple of clever gags scattered throughout. In my daily life I've encountered people like Angela and Briony both of whom are bought to life perfectly by Enright and McShera. Meanwhile the programme also has a likeable lead in the form of Russell Tovey's Karl who gets through his day with the help of a drawer full of biscuits. Tovey is always an endearing screen presence and here his likeability is put to full use. I also thought Sarah Hadland was perfectly cast as the increasingly stressed Trish who is the perfect personification of the harassed boss.

Though The Job Lot does have some clunky moments, I found it to be a likeable sitcom with plenty to offer. Still I don't think it deserves its place on primetime television just yet and should've maybe been placed on ITV2 instead. I'm also not sure why it's been grouped with Vicious as the two have very little in common and will attract very different audiences.

Vicious was followed at 9.30pm by a quiet, likeable new sitcom called The Job Lot. Set in a job centre, it starred Russell Tovey in the "Tim from The Office" role (ordinary bloke doing a job he hates, surrounded by halfwits). A regular character is a woman who refuses any job going. He suggested one at Upper Crust. "I'm wheat intolerant," she protested, as if the job were not selling the goods but eating them.

The Job Lot got off to a very strong start.

Sarah Hadland stars as Trish, the manager of a West Midlands job centre, recently returned from stress-related sickness leave. Ostensibly sunny and positive - "turn the unemployed into the fun employed" is her motto - Trish struggles to maintain the facade in a work environment beset by resentment, hostility, despair, defeatism and bureaucracy. And that's before they open up to the public.

The show is essentially an ensemble piece - a uniformly excellent cast includes Russell Tovey, Jo Enright and Emma Rigby - but it is Hadland's understated, poignant portrayal of brittle optimism under unbearable stress that holds it all together. It is good to see Hadland, best known as Miranda Hart's sidekick Stevie in the former's eponymous sitcom, emerging from Hart's shadow as a fine comic actor in her own right.