Toast Of London

This madcap sitcom centring on Steven Toast (The IT Crowd's Matt Berry), an eccentric middle-aged actor returns to Channel 4 on Friday. In preparation, the sublimely surreal first season is available on demand.

Radio Times review

With an imperious performance from Matt Berry, Toast of London series two continued to be a joyously surreal take on the life of an arrogant, sexually incontinent actor whom you couldn't help taking to your heart. Self-consciously old fashioned, Toast of London is set in the present day but presents a world where the next day's theatre "notices" still hold sway, business is done on landline telephones and a feud with a medallion-wearing, moustache-sporting fellow called Ray Purchase consumes our hero's energies. With some of the most wonderfully silly names in any comedy ever ("Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!"), Toast of London was bold, brash and laugh-out-loud funny.

Sam Neill to guest star in Toast of London

Toast of London star Matt Berry has revealed that Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill will guest in series three.

It's been an eventful second series for Matt Berry's failing thesp, which has included acting in high wind, masonic cults and, in last week's final episode, a guest appearance from Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. Toast will be back for a third anarchic outing next year, while in the meantime newcomers can enjoy the full first two runs on 4OD.

Toast of London, Channel 4 - TV review

Matt Berry has been nominated in six categories at this year's British Comedy Awards, so any gripe about last night's Toast of London series finale (Channel 4) will soon be drowned out by applause. Here's my gripe, anyway: Josh Homme's cameo in "Fool in Love" was exactly the sort of pointless, "meet my famous chums" name-dropping that Toast of London usually skewers so mercilessly. It made for a disappointingly dull denouement to the best sitcom on television.

Toast Of London, series 2 review

The second series of Toast of London has taught me a lot about my own taste in comedy, and the more I think about the programme, the more I realise how much I enjoyed watching it.

In the last in the series, Toast is knocked very much for six by the arrival of an old flame, Lorna Wynde, more than three decades after she broke his heart when the pair starred in a US soap together. But is she just using him to make her rock star husband jealous? Tormented by feelings from the past, Toast takes up with his very-much-alive chum Francis Bacon. Sterling guest appearances come from Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme and The League of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton.

Radio Times review

Steven Toast is in turmoil - the greatest love of his life, Lorna Wynde, is appearing in The Graduate on the London stage. Toast has never recovered from their break-up, after which he had an unfortunate accident in Oddbins.

The best bits of the final, typically uneven episode are the masterly pastiches of dreadful 1980s American soaps. Toast (Matt Berry) and Wynde (Morgana Robinson) starred together in one such atrocity, but it put an end to her TV career as she went cross-eyed in close-ups.

Steve Pemberton, soon to be seen in Mapp and Lucia on BBC One, plays a very effete Francis Bacon and Josh Homme, lead singer of rock band Queens of the Stone Age, guests as Lorna's jealous husband.

Toast of London, Channel 4, review

I hope we see more of Matt Berry and his co-writer Arthur Mathews's fantasy brand of comedy. Whether that should be with the unlovable but pitiable Toast, I'm not so sure.