Not acting the part

Continuing in my bad habit of writing about new comedy series on the strength of the first episode...

'Extras' wasn't great, really, was it?

Gervais and Merchant are masters of the comic potential in social awkwardness and uncomfortable silences, and that's once more in evidence. And, as with 'The Office', there's also no laughter track. Indeed, the laughs seemed much fewer and far between - not necessarily a problem, but...

Whither characters? First episode and all that I know, but Gervais's character and his friend, who shouldered most of the screen time, are colourless.

My concern was that each episode would be very much hung around the particular celebrity, and that many of the laughs would come from self-parody and them making jokes at their own expense - and unfortunately that looks like being the pattern.

The fact that the film Ben Stiller was directing in this first episode told the story of an Eastern European widower allowed for some not particularly sharp satire on Hollywood recreations of war scenes - all of which left a rather sour taste in the mouth when I switched over to catch the second half of 'Dispatches' on C4, which featured horrific footage of the Beslan school massacre. Genuinely distressing viewing, and something that made 'Extras' seem even more like insubstantial fluff.