Friday Night Dinner - C4 Sitcom - British Comedy Guide

On paper it couldn't have looked better – Simon Bird from The Inbetweeners, Tamsin Greig and Mark Heap from The Green Wing and Tom Rosenthal from Jim Rosenthal's reproductive system acting out a script by Robert Popper from Look Around You. And yet when Friday Night Dinner hit television screens last month, it was met with almost universal disapproval.

The main gripes seemed to revolve around its pace (too gentle), its premise (we've already got a sitcom about a Jewish family who regularly convene in the same place in Grandma's House, so why make another one?) and its cast. But now that Friday Night Dinner has had a few episodes to settle in, is it improving?

Well, yes and no. Many of the flaws that stuck out at the start are still present, mainly because they can't be changed. Chief among them is Simon Bird who,buy movie dvds online, thanks to the runaway success of The Inbetweeners, seems to have decided that he's only ever going to play Will McKenzie in everything he ever does from now on, right down to his determination to shoehorn at least one "brilliant" into every episode,store dvds.

And, although it might seem like an unnecessarily petty complaint, the programme is framed all wrong. At its heart Friday Night Dinner is a cosy about a middle-aged couple who cook dinner for their children once a week, and yet the opening titles sound like an advert for a ropey Ministry of Sound compilation. The incidental music borders dangerously on dubstep – it's an atrocious fit that routinely jettisons you out of the moment. If there's a second series, it desperately needs to be changed.

But perhaps the real problem with Friday Night Dinner is that it doesn't live up to everyone's expectations of it. Until now, the bulk of Robert Popper's work has been screamingly absurd – whether it's themoments of Look Around You or his . The fact that Friday Night Dinner turned out to be a fairly conventional family sitcom rooted in actual human relationships came as a bit of a curveball, especially after Channel Four had spent months furiously talking it up as the next Inbetweeners.

But once you're locked into Friday Night Dinner's peculiar groove, the show does start to make a lot more sense. Although it shares a few superficial similarities with Grandma's House, it has a much more whimsical core, which allows for some pleasantly Popperesque moments. Despite his relatively small amount of screen time, Mark Heap as oddball neighbour Jim routinely steals every episode, and the moment in the second episode where Paul Ritter revealed that he kept inspecting his penis because he was stung by a bee while having a wee was winningly silly. It's not a perfect programme by any means, but there's a lot of promise – if you look through all the hype and the noise and allow Friday Night Dinner to be what it is, the laughs are there.

But what do you think? Has Friday Night Dinner been winning you over or are you still refusing to accept its charms? Should it return for a second series? Let us know below.