“The boredom of inconsequential lives is a hard thing to pull off in a comedy without it becoming boring and inconsequential itself.” Read on for the verdict on last night’s TV.

THE CAFE

THE CAFE, SKY1

“If it’s a sitcom.. then it’s boldly reinventing the genre. There are about four jokes an episode, everybody gets on swimmingly and the characters are as bland as a plate of boiled chips… The main problem is that the pace is painfully slow. Glacial, even… What there wasn’t was any semblance of a self-contained plot.. In fairness to the writers, their performances are both consistently excellent, and the direction is both naturalistic and nicely understated.”
Tom Meltzer, The Guardian

“It is Gavin & Stacey with the madness removed, Him & Her without the sniping. The boredom of inconsequential lives is a hard thing to pull off in a comedy without it becoming boring and inconsequential itself… It is fragile to the point of filigree, but there is something affecting about a comedy that almost makes a joke about confusing Turner with Titian and decides, instead, that knowing the distinction is more pitiable.”
Andrew Billen, The Times 

“One of those sitcoms that despises the belly laugh and the punchline… It’s a distinctively modern mode…and, far from shying away from banality and tedium – as most other kinds of comedy do – it embraces it affectionately, as the common grain of daily life. ..It might take a while, but these characters could become as lovable to us as they already clearly are to their creators.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

YOUR MONEY AND HOW THEY SPEND IT, BBC2

“A programme about tax generally has little to recommend it even when it’s presented by BBC political editor Nick Robinson but faced with the choice of watch it or do the washing up i watched it. Actually it wasn’t that bad.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express  

“It was essentially a study in political dishonesty and the wilful blindness of voters, with short-term decisions taken to win elections generating the kind of liabilities that lose them.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

THE DEVIL’S DINNER PARTY, SKY ATLANTIC

“The idea behind what is literally a party game is strong: a soirée in which the assumptions strangers make about one another privately are outed in pursuit of greed… It should improve as future guests work out that nice guys come last, but it was a strong start anyway: speed hating.”
Andrew Billen, The Times 

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