It’s Christmas Time, There’s No Need To Be Afraid.

You can tell Christmas has finally arrived when Carols from King’s College gets rolled out (BBC2 at 6:15pm if you fancy). No matter what your family’s traditions are on the 24th Decmeber, I am pretty sure that television will play a part in it somewhere if only to take the weight off your feet for half an hour. BBC1 will entertain you with a non-stop selection of light(weight?) entertainment throughout the evening. From 8pm there’s an hour-long installment of My Family, which I gave up watching after Kris Marshall left to join BT and I continue to work on the assumption that it’s not worth going back to. After that

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Big Bang Theory, Carols, David Tennant, How I Met Your Mother, Kris Marshall, My-Family, QI, Taggart, Victoria Wood

Welcome to the World, Neil-lar 

Like The Office before it, the first series sneaked onto the schedules with no so much a fanfare as a whisper; word of mouth and critical recommendation followed and the soon-to-be cult viewership began to fall in love with this cast of wierd and wonderful characters; series two aired and the plaudits and awards have been thrust upon it along with hundred of thousands of extra viewers; and now a Christmas Special has been comissioned and you can be sure it will be BBC Three’s

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: BAFTA, BBC3, Britcom, Extras, Fawlty Towers, Gavin Stacey, James Corden, Matt Horne, My-Family, Ruth Jones, Sitcom, The-Office

Christmas Review #5 of 12

“From the makers of Friends” is the kind of tagline for a new sitcom that is all but guaranteed to add a pretty big slice to the viewing figures. Fortunately, for fans of Friends, this new ensemble comedy, The Class, ticks all the right boxes and gives us a welcome break from the constant loop of Friends repeats that appears to be cycling through ad infinitum on E4 a thousand times a day. The comedy here is driven by a the fact that the main players all used to go to school together and

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: E4, Frasier, Friends, Last of the Summer Wine, My-Family, The Class

Surprising Success

British sitcoms that are both high quality and highly popular have been a rare breed in the last few years, so it was with some trepidation that I approached Not Going Out, the latest in a series of BBC1, Friday night comedies in the tradition of My Hero (awful since the first episode) and My Family (started well, but never the same after Kris Marshall left).  Penned by famous talking head from many a “list show”, Andrew Collins and sketch show regular, Lee Mack, they have created what is

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Andrew-Collins, BBC1, Comedy, Lee-Mack, My-Family, My-Hero, Not-Going-Out, Tim-Vine