MISFORTUNE! Lead Balloon, BBC2, 10.00pm
Various posters are suggesting on the I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! thread on the forums that there’s precious little to watch on telly during the week save for Desperate Housewives – an opinion that I don’t necessarily disagree with, but it troubles me, since if people aren’t finding stuff they want to watch, then I feel like I’m not doing my job on the front page properly and recommending good stuff.
With that in mind, I’m putting forward the case for something I like very much: Lead Balloon, Jack Dee’s sitcom, which returns for a third series tonight. Admittedly the comparisons to Curb Your Enthusiasm have rather overshadowed the show in the past, and they’re not entirely unwarranted since the two shows do indeed tred the same patch of lawn, but whereas I always found Larry David’s irascibility rather hard to warm to, I’ve always been on Rick Spleen’s side. He’s not a bad person, he just has a habit of saying the wrong thing all the time, and then just somehow managing to dig his way deeper into the pit he’s created until he starts hitting sewer pipes. Hey, speaking as someone equally socially inept, I can relate.
The third series sees a few changes afoot: Rick’s marvellously surly eastern European housekeeper Magda (her specific country of origin is deliberately kept very vague) has temporarily moved in to escape the carbon monoxide leak in her bedsit (a situation which Rick fears will lead to her developing squatter’s rights), and Michael’s café is now some kind of bistro – or at least it will be when it has some customers. If you’re stuck for something to do with your evenings, you could do a lot worse than this.
