Comedy Showcase: Campus, Channel 4

“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good thing. However I’m not sure the formula has survived the relocation from hospital to campus.

For one thing, they are such different – almost opposite - environments. Whatever else goes on in universities, it’s not life-or death decisions being made by sleep-deprived people struggling to cope on four hours sleep and a gallon of strong coffee. Not in the faculty I once attended anyway, or, at least, not until my finals. Universities are also sprawling organisms made up of barely connecting parts, or, as one author on the subject once put it: “the only thing connecting the modern university is the central heating unit (or a concern for car-parking”).

When we spoke recently, Pile denied naming her fictional establishment “Kirke University” (filmed, by the way, at Brunel University in Middlesex) after Howard Kirk, the posy, libidinous, Marxist sociology lecturer played by Anthony Sher in the 1981 adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man. The fact remains, however, that campus TV drama and comedy had its heyday amidst the Thatcherite spending cuts of the 1980s, with The History Man, TV adaptations of David Lodge’s Small World and Nice Work and, above all, Andrew Davies’s campus classic, A Very Peculiar Practice.

Bradbury, Lodge and Davies all have academic backgrounds, and it showed. Pile, despite being the daughter of an erstwhile permanent under-secreraty of state for education,Sir William Pile, does not. She is a visitor - albeit a sensitive, sharp witted and intelligent visitor - to academia, and that shows as well. But I don’t think that this is the true reason for the unreality, or superficiality, that pervades Campus. That might just come from the Green Wing madcap style of comedy – a style that worked well in hospitals (surreal places at the best, or worst, of times), but struggles in the less obviously pressurised academic environment.

What we had here was a collection of bravura, but slightly disconnected improv performances from a talented bunch of up and coming comic actors. It really was a case of six (or maybe seven or eight) characters in search of an author – or, at least, in search of a straight guy. It was all a bit one note, each character relentlessly vying to top the other with caustic repartee – repartee that was admittedly clever, fast and, quite often, funny. But did it really connect with the viewer? Not with this one.

Andy Nyman, wearing a horrible goaty beard as vice chancellor Jonty de Wolfe, was David Brent’ish without Brent’s horrible plausibility. Actually he was David Brent fused with The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, but where Tucker’s colourfully vitriolic psychosis comes from the pressures of political warfare, Jonty’s unpleasantness seemed to emanate from a vague, almost epicurean delight in being offensive for its own sake. The tone is set in the opening sequence, in which he tells a disabled student that, just because he’s in a wheelchair doesn’t mean he’ll be the next Stephen Hawkins. Being unPC about disability has become a trope of a certain typ of post-Office sitcom.

If Jonty seemed to float above the drama – indeed he was given to magic tricks and suddenly vanishing (he was also prone to striding about in a dress) – Joseph Millson’s priapic and underachieving (except with the latest crop of freshers) English professor Matthew Beer - a sort of post-political Howard Kirk - was all too believable. Jonty was pressurising Beer to dream up a bestseller – one of his colleagues in the maths department having hit publishing pay-dirt with plausibly titled The True Story of Zero. “Publish... get the foreigners in... stop fucking everything that moves”, to which Beer reasonably repled, “Where’s the fun in that?”. There were some good lines here (I liked Beer’s description of himself as “a little bit Clooney, a little bit Basil Brush”), but they often felt strained, especially when Armando Ianucci and co. have raised the bar so high with these sorts of verbal fireworks in The Thick of It.

It’s notoriously hard to judge a comedy on a first episode and, perhaps as with an undergraduate, Campus should be given three years to prove itself (Green Wing dropped out after two). Personally I’d prefer to see Pile divert her considerable talents as a comedy producer and writer into (as they say) something completely different.