F*cking H*larious

Speaking of comedy, which we were, I've caught about one and a half episodes of BBC2's Joanna Lumley vehicle Sensitive Skin, which they keep telling us is some kind of comedy. Here's a flavour:

A chance meeting with an old school friend prompts Davina Jackson to begin looking back on her childhood. And when her mother suffers another stroke, she literally returns to her old haunts. Meanwhile, Al also confronts his past in the guise of an old flame and media grandee Sarah Thorne. This programme contains strong language."

It's whimsical at times, ironic, yes, but not therapeutically funny.

At one point, Lumley sits whimsically on a seat in some woodland and has a conversation about her lost childhood with her imaginary childhood friend, who appears to have been waiting for her. How we laughed. Later she visits her immobile stroke victim mother in the nursing home.

Meanwhile, her husband, played by Denis Lawson, has a crisis in confidence when he meets a loud, braying former sweetheart, who runs some kind of Melvin Bragg-style round table discussion on radio. Earlier, Lumley had met a former schoolfriend, who had admired her beauty and confidence with boys and felt a failure in comparison. The whimsical ironical moment comes when she tells Lumley she's now - essentially - a brain surgeon, while all Lumley has left is her slowly fading beauty. I think I got a stitch in my side laughing at that bit.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with whim and iron. There's certainly room in this vast multi-channel universe. But you can't help thinking that in some parallel alternate universe BBC2 had something on that was actually funny, and didn't send my alternate self to bed feeling suicidal.