Whites

Video: Alan Davies swaps QI for kitchen

Alan Davies talks to BBC Breakfast about Whites.

As previously recorded, tvBite is not a big fan of Alan Davies. Cluttering up QI, biting vagrants and abusing people on Twitter is no way to run a career. Still, we always enjoyed Jonathan Creek, and Whites was written by Super Hans from Peep Show, who we love dearly so we're proud to say that we haven't let Davies dislike colour our view. Davies plays Roland White, a chef who in look and name at least, is clearly based on Marco Pierre... He's lost his passion for cooking and is coasting in a country house hotel, where he has settled in to write his memoirs.

Hardly biting, but there is strong support from The IT Crowd's lovely Katherine Parkinson as his long-suffering Maître d' and Darren Boyd as his appallingly treated assistant. Its tone is similar to Rev and even though Davies is nowhere near the talent Tom Hollander is, there are enough set-ups to make you think the rest of the series could be a little bit tastier.

Whites: Half-Baked

Despite signs of genuine potential, there isn't much here to raise more than a wry smile.

Alan Davies - he's the curly-haired Arsenal fan who used to be a stand-up - stars in this new comedy drama about once-famous chef Roland White, who long-ago lost his pizzazz and with it his Michelin stars. Now's he's struggling to keep a country-house hotel afloat in the company of his long-suffering sous chef, Bib (Darren Boyd).

Their task isn't made easier by dozy waitress Kiki (Isy Suttie), ambitious apprentice chef Skoose (Stephen Wight) and sarcastic restaurant manager Caroline (Katherine Parkinson). There's a great moment in tonight's opening episode which involves Kiki telling Skoose what happened when she was caught short and had to go to the toilet behind a gravestone in the churchyard. "I thought I saw a ghost, but it was just wee steam." She also asks Bib for an eggless omlette, and is handed an empty plate sprinkled with parsley.

The cast trained in Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant, so at least the chopping and plating-up look fairly authentic. So does the way the programme is filmed, using fast editing and handheld cameras to give a real idea of what life in a busy kitchen is actually like.

Writers Matt King and Oliver Lansley are said to have modelled the whole thing on the US hit Entourage, which isn't a bad template for a comedy drama. Looking down the cast list, it might be safer to say Peep Show is the inspiration: Suttie also plays the wonderful Dobby in the long-running Channel 4 comedy, while writer King (who also appears in Whites as wheeler-dealer Melvin) is better known as Super Hans.

He's a versatile man, is Alan Davies. He plays the fool in QI, a magician/detective in Jonathan Creek and has just relived his revolutionary teen years for documentary purposes. For this new sitcom he's in actorly mode again, playing a hotel head chef called Roland White - any relation to Marco Pierre? - who goes against the grain of the highly stressed Gordon Ramsays of this world by being a bit of a slacker. Also stars Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd) and Isy Suttie (Dobby from Peep Show).

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