Did we like it?

If British comedy had gone for a night on the tiles, feasted on a banquet of banal sitcom set-ups and washed it all down with pint after pint of tired joke juice before throwing most of it back up in the street on the way home, then this would be the vomit-spattered remains being avoided by nauseous shoppers the next day.

What was good about it?

• Perhaps because the script had been ethnically cleansed of all humour, the cast deserved plaudits for battling on in atrocious conditions like soldiers in the trenches having to crap in No Man’s Land, picking the lice from their comrades’ hair for lunch and maintaining their sanity that at any moment they could be shot by the enemy, or even their own side.

• Celia Imrie as the incorrigible harridan Diana delivered each line as if poking a needle into someone’s eye, valiantly squeezing line after line of all its comedy like she was sieving the modesty from Simon Cowell’s heart.

• And Lee Oakes as Jimmy’s mixed up son Alex showed promise as dressed in his sister’s clothes and duelled verbally with his grandmother Diana. He resembles, both in looks and mannerisms, David Tennant’s Dr Who in his more slapstick moments.

What was bad about it?

• Comedies need laughs, this had none. The situations Jimmy stumbled into were simple variations on scenarios employed hundreds of times before