I have heard that in the audition for the role of administrator, actresses were told to think of Dawn from The Office. Big deal. It's clearly a ripoff. But so was The IT Crowd. So what? If. If. IF it's funny.

In The English Class, Myles (William Morgan) loafs about the class room in a cardigan with a barmy Beavis & Butthead snigger ("Heh! Heh!") as his character's signature tick. A Russian student tells a story about his daughter.

"She cries to me, " the student says to a hushed classroom, "I'm so sad." Silence. Myles doesn't know what to do. This awkwardness is supposed to be innately funny. It isn't. The students are lazy, so Myles explodes in temper. It is a complete non-sequitur. But inappropriate outbursts are supposed to be innately funny. It isn't. It doesn't make sense dramatically, so it means nothing as comedy. Even Hyacinth Bucket had motivation.

A newcomer, Nadia from Belarus, has no English.

(Actually, she does, but that's clearly of no concern here. ) The class guesses Nadia's job in a jarring happy musical montage.

Nadia finally says, "My husband tried to beat me and leave me on the side of the road to die. I see lights in the distance, lights on articulated lorry. It runs me over.

I try to drag myself into a ditch. I hear rats. I am in human excrement." Silence. Myles turns to the administrator, "Fair's fair, this new one you've given me has absolutely no f***ing English at all." The end. Curb Your Enthusiasm this isn't. It lacks Larry David's subtlety, imagination and heart. If I were sitting pretty in Montrose, I'd pull it.

To be funny and provocative, you need pathos or knowingness or warmth, like with Basil Fawlty, Alf Garnett, Reginald Perrin or David Brent. Otherwise you become what it is you are trying to satirise, the line blurs between writer/actor/character. I question the judgment of the writer of this kind of lowest-commondenominator shlock-com.

A slightly more successful telespawn is The Riches, starring Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard as Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, Irish-American travellers, who are grifters, though I accept this isn't going to be welcomed with open arms by the Traveller community. This is The Sopranos meets The Beverly Hillbillies.

Having robbed the kitty from their commune, they are pursued by another traveller family, who bump into them at a petrol station and notice they're in the money: "You've been rollin' pretty good crankin' that premium!" A great line. As they are chased, another car is run off the road. The wealthy occupants of that car die, and the Malloys and their three sulky kids assume their identity.

Driver gives it her all as the drug-addicted Dahlia while Izzard is smooth and likeable.

Their southern accents, however, are all over the gaff. The Malloys move to a gated community.

"This American dream, they don't just give it to you with a big old ribbon and a bow, " Dahlia says. "If we want it, we have to take it, do whatever it takes to hold on to it till they rip it out of our cold dead hands." This strange hybrid may not have the stamina of a thoroughbred to last a second season, but it carries the same message as its forbears.

We and Middle America should heed its call.

In another blast from the past, Stephen Fry: HIV & Me, a documentary to remind us that it hasn't gone away you know. Fry, as bumbling uncle, wonders if images of Aids patients from the 1980s would encourage more people to use protection and get tested. There are 70,000 people in the UK with HIV, up 400% among heterosexuals in 10 years.

Gordon, a gay guy from Manchester took a HIV test on camera. "I like positive thinking!"

he chirped, somewhat annoyingly considering the gravity of the situation. It was negative. Carly, an HIV positive teenager, writes a blog after suffering verbal abuse from her peers and her exboyfriend's foul-mouthed fishwife of a mother. Like sunshine, Carly is exactly the kind of human being who makes you want to get up in the morning.