Blessed

A truly genuine programme on the joys of new parenthood. There we were - my husband and i, watching "Blessed" on a Friday night, laughing saying "we're not the only ones!" Thought the smug neighbours were spot on and Mel Giedroycis brilliant as a new harassed mother. Ben Elton has captured the highs and lows of family life in half hour slot beautifully. Gary and Sue - the two new parents - had me nodding my head in relation to each story line. The frantic loss of "sheepie" (sons favourite toy) - the disappearance of dummies ("where do they go?" Sue asks in bewilderment and anger - my point exactly) Ardal O'Hanlon captures the distress of a new father who does his best not to drown in nappies, cynicism and baby colds.

Absolutely awful.

Poor Ben Elton has a lot of catching up to do if we wants to be where Richard Curtis is at. And this unfunny sitcom that has no studio audience, has dreadful, cringe-worthy middle class characters is no help. Even the theme tune evokes memories of the Curtis created Vicar of Dibley. Every week this show fails the five-minute test; I doubt you will still be with the show after the first five minutes.

Finally, and this is another shot in the foot, Ardal O'Hanlon was good in Father Ted, but wasted in My Hero, which he should have stopped doing after one series, is not the ideal leading man here. The guy pretending to be Mick Jagger is simply irritating.

....and now I'm up to episode #7. I really was hoping it'd be over by now (not to mention canceled, once everything connected with the show -including the actors - had been dumped along with some toxic waste in the middle of the ocean somewhere, never to be seen again), because this series really is dire.

To have this program listed under the genre of 'comedy' is at best misleading! It's so hard to believe Ben Elton could write something this bad, maybe this points to a lot of input from the other writers in everything he's been connected with before. In some episodes I haven't even laughed once!

Oh, and I can't believe Ardal O'Hanlon actually stopped doing 'My hero' & started doing this instead, his decision making skills were obviously impaired that day - perhaps he simply can't read, and didn't realise just how poor the scripts for 'Blessed' were. Don't get me wrong, 'My Hero' is not masterpiece, but it's a million times better than this piece of junk.

And just to annoy me even more I bet this gets a DVD release as well, when there are so many great TV series' that aren't getting released!

Blessed would have been forgivable... if it hadn't been followed by Outnumbered from the same TV channel, which immediately exposed Blessed and its treatment of the family as a complete fraud. In Blessed, the kids spoke with obviously dubbed phrases. In Outnumbered they were allowed to be actual actors. The difference was stunning.

For all that, Ben Elton's observations on the recording industry and its inherent corruption and stupidity as as sharp as Elton's observations on television production in Inconceivable.

It's a shame that the comedy that wrapped around them both was so insipid, although much of that was insipid. Lovely song to sing to your kids in bed though. "Dream whistle blowing..."

Sadly, I have to agree with the majority of viewer comments so far. As much as I enjoyed Blackadder and think that Ben Elton is an intelligent and genuine human being with a good, if patchy, track record, for me Blessed fails on all levels.

Primarily consisting of irritatingly smug middle class characters delivering deeply obvious and unfunny lines in a stilted way that made the performances in Ever Decreasing Circles seem like Lenny Bruce on crack, perhaps the worst sections involved the occasionally hapless depictions of musicians in a recording studio, which seemed to be based on half-remembered episodes of Rock Follies.

In many ways, it's sad to see someone who subverted and refreshed the nature of sitcom in the 1980s produce such a dated, tired, clichéd and hopelessly out of touch series. Constantly at odds with the way real people live, speak and look, it appears that Elton's art has turned into everything The Young Ones seemed to be fighting against.