ubercommando

With all due respect to Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicolls and their characters, Department S will be forever associated with Peter Wyngarde's Jason King.

Most people remember him as this camp, flamboyant and debonair womaniser cum detective in the mould of Austin Powers but that will do a disservice to the character: He's far more nuanced than that.

Jason King is lazy (he often lets Stewart fight all the bad guys and only chips in at the end), he is egotistical (his appreciation of people is based on whether they've read his novels or not), a lot of his detective work is speculation without facts to back them up and he sulks whenever Annabelle is right...and she often is. He's clearly a man having a mid-life crisis and drink drives but.......Jason King is brilliant. If Wyngarde had played him purely as a dashing hero, it wouldn't have worked but he shows King often as a paper tiger, led by his libido, love of finery and prone to grandstanding (and it gets in the way of his detective work at times) but he has some of the best lines and put downs in TV history. And by not playing him as whiter-than-white, the chemistry and interactions between the three lead characters is all the better for it.

Watching it again on DVD recently, you get to see just how much depth Wyngarde put into Jason King.

Rivron was a one of kind chat show; the kind that could never be done before or again. The premise was simple: Get Rowland Rivron, whose name sounds a bit like river, to interview celebrities whilst floating in the River Thames at night. Each week, Rivron and his guests would float and try to tread water and not drown whilst wearing life jackets. Questions and answers would be frequently interrupted by the cast accidentally gulping water whilst they spoke and things got really dicey when a boat would pass and they had to deal with its wake. And rivers in the night tend to be cold as well so you could hear chattering of teeth. Eventually, the show was shut down because of health and safety issues and the last episode has the River Police shutting the whole thing down. Rivron also had a really snazzy show biz intro and music which was at odds with the low production values of the show.

The Inbetweeners is the bastard child of your typical Channel 4 "with it" mentality and the movie "Superbad". It borrows from the latter a bunch of central characters, all boys, who are desperate to party, get drunk and get laid. It borrows from the former a desire to be cutting edge, quirky and hip to the kids...in short, comedy guided by middle aged channel execs.

It can be genuinely funny, particularly in the first episode where the boys try to exploit some obscure licensing laws in order to buy drinks in a pub and the aftermath where the nerd character outs all the school kids who are underage drinking. It can also be muddled and packed full of repellent characters who are more annoying than funny. What could be a well developed growing friendship between the two main characters, a nerd who's family have fallen on hard times and has moved from a private school to a state one and the boy assigned to be his "mentor" against his will, is never fully realised as the show is too keen on showing all the kids partying and generally behaving in gross ways. It's like Channel 4 have seen Superbad and missed the point of the friendship that underpins the movie.

Also the parent characters are very poorly developed, as you might expect in a movie like this. Again, they've taken from Superbad the idea that one of the characters has a hot mum all the other boys want to screw. Not only that, the actors playing the parents all seem to be in their early 30s and too young to have 16 year old children.

But like I said, it can be very funny when it doesn't try too hard to ingratiate itself with its target audience. Oh, and it's way more watchable than "Skins".