It's so good to see a BBC comedy which, while not an insult to the intelligence (Mrs Brown take note), is actually trying to make people laugh - and on prime time too! Daftness, slapstick, beautifully performed live stunts, and above all laughter. The trend for ditching studio audiences and laugh tracks has been a dead end - has led to a string of painfully up-themselves middle class memoirs posing as comedies. Because if you have a laugh track, you have to be at least a little bit funny or you just embarrass yourself - it keeps comedy honest.
To get postmodern audiences to accept this kind of material, though, the makers have framed the whole thing ironically: you're not laughing at what happens on the show so much, you're laughing at the show itself. The drawback is, there's no real story or characters to sustain your interest in the gags. Half an hour of this, therefore, is a lot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, the first really hopeful sign from BBC1 comedy since Miranda - and that, as they recently reminded us, is now 10 years ago!
