Viscious & The Job Lot - TV Review

With ITV putting both these new sitcoms on one after the other maybe they were anticipating them both to be reviewed and seen together and in that sense hedging their bets. That if one bombed then the other might be a hit. For me, I thought both were pretty good, Viscious being surprisingly the funnier, edgier show. Edgier may seem a surprising word to use given the two main characters of Viscious are an extrovert gay couple living in a room which could have easily been a setting for a number of sitcoms in the seventies. However, a lot of the jokes I found were funny, deliberately over the top, and in this age of everything being PC, this gay inspired nostalgic comedy was indeed taking a risk now and then. The main comedy though lies in the barbed insults Derek jacobi and Ian Mckellan constantly throw at each other. 'I was young, famous and handsome' says one to which the other replies ' You were barely one of those' Other opportunities for humour lie in the arrival of an 'attractive' young man who moves in upstairs and is thrust into their closed world of insulting banter. A world where the curtaains are never opened and the dorrbell ringing is a major event. Another typica joke is Frances de la Tour asks the young man from upstairs if he is Zac Efron or is he from Zac Efron not quite sure who or what Zac Efron is. It's a show which no doubt, as has been seen already on Twitter, you either go with or go against. I'm going with it and be watching it next week. The Job Lot was set in a Midlands job centre and with it being another mockumentary style show it couln't help bring comparisons (as with every such show) with The Office. Especially with Russell Tovey as a kind of Tim type character stuck in a job and surrounded by people he'd do anything to escape. Sarah Hadland plays another character, the office manager driven to despair by her workforce's reluctance to match her enthusiasm and spirit which itself is an act. There's a set list of characters which include genuine claimants who want to work, those that don't, hapless security guards, otehr job centre workers who seem to be extremes of real people. It all seemed fairly predictable but like Viscious, with this being the first episode, it certainly has the potential to build further in the coming weeks.