Piglets

I so wanted to like this. I'm a great fan of Mark Heap and Rebecca Humphries, and still regard Green Wing as an underrated masterpiece.

But, oh dear. The problem, as so often with comedies nowadays, is that it simply isn't funny because the material is so weak, lazy and uninspired.

Combine poorly written dialogue with an overabundance of second-rate actors and the result is an embarrassing mess. There's no other way of saying it.

I'm going to persevere because I refuse to believe that writers of this auspicious pedigree will not improve as the show progresses. But the signs are not good so far.

Just awful. It's trying to be like Police Academy but has completely failed. Casting rubbish, script/writing rubbish, acting rubbish. The two training "superintendents" are superintendents one moment (crown on their epaulettes) then in the next scene they've been immediately promoted to Chief Superintendents (crown and pip on epaulettes), then back to superintendents again.

They tick all the equality and diversity boxes. ITV must be so desperate to commission this @#&* Whoever commissioned this tripe to be aired needs a good holiday or the sacked.

I certainly won't be watching any follow up series, life is precious and I wouldn't waste any of it watching this.

Itv isn't known for a lot of good comedy. It's not all Man About The House, Rising Damp, Only When I Laugh and this goes to show that Changing Ends is a modern exception (Viscous and The Job Lot were very good a few short years ago).

Quality actors like an unrecognisable Sarah Parish, Colin McFarlane and the usual Mark Heap are wasted here while Ricky Champ who played an inmate in a psychiatric hospital in Suspect on Channel 4 this week finds himself in another institution - an unfunny itv comedy.

Characters can take time to develop but, having bingewatched the first (and hopefully, only) series, I am no closer to liking the sexually-repressed characters that can't even supply their own catchphrase to look forward to with each episode.

Perhaps fewer characters might have given more laughs but an unfunny opening titles sequence with an unforgettable theme doesn't hold out for a good show ahead. The Thin Blue Line this isn't.

Many unfunny comedies use eye candy to hide from a poor script. Katherine Kelly in last year's equally bad Ruby Speaking springs to mind and Callie Cooke offers much the same here (Scorpio legs!) but Greeta is probably the most realistic of the recruits but she isn't funny either.

A lot of talented wasted by a group of fifth former writers it seems.

Could've been great if it had been written by someone who understood the job of police and could wrote something funny. Unfortunately, this is just amateur, stereotypical drivel that might appease certain demographics, but unlikely to appeal broadly. The jokes are flat, the acting is embarrassing and comedy is just not funny. Such a wasted opportunity to do something new Even Police Academy is funnier than this and I mean the last, really bad one. The best thing that could happen to this show is it quietly moved to the small hours of the morning and dropped slowly so the memory of even having laid eyes on it can be attributed to some kind of fever dream.

Well this one is really really scraping the barrel that a world champion barrel scraper had scraped till they couldn't scrape no more. Every single joke falls flat and misses the mark so much it's painful. It jammed full of unlikeable characters that for the most part you can't relate to them.

They throw every stereotype at you, filling the show with too many characters to give a decent story arc or much to do. The problem we have with some of modern sitcoms these days is the writer are to afraid to write something funny in case it offends someone. It's time for sitcoms to be funny once more.

To give you an idea of how unfunny this is, they have more laughs in an episode of Mrs Browns Boys.