Sitcom is a curious form of writing, and more than that of performance.  For the com to emerge from the sit, it seems to be traditional for the actors to exaggerate things in a fashion that I find unconvincing, and which is very much one of the conventions of the genre.

Tonight saw the first episode of The Old Guys, a new BBC1 offering created by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the partnership behind the highly successful Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show.  The core of the matter is in the title: this is a series about two older gents, Tom and Roy.  Tom, played by Roger Lloyd-Pack, is the edgier of the two, a bit of an old hippy in some respects.  Roy, portrayed by Clive Swift, is more along the lines of a conventional older tv character, a suburban chap who probably spent his career in a series of offices.

The show opened with some relatively risque material about Alzheimers and prostate cancer before settling into more familiar sitcom territory.  The two men are sharing a house for reasons that are never explored, which is a shame since it could be the basis of interesting material: two guys in their twenties living together is hardly unexpected.  For the men to be doing the same in their sixties, there almost certainly is the basis of a story there.  Maybe it’ll appear in a future episode.

Guess who lives across the road from our elderly protagonists?  Jane Asher, who’s having a party and wants the lads to help prepare it.  Only, she never actually makes it clear whether they’re invited to the party, or just expected to be her skivvies.  What passes for the plot hangs on this slender thread, in a script by Simon Blackwell: not sure whether we’ll get to see Bain and Armstrong do any of the wordwrangling themselves, or if their role is to oversee apprentices.

Certainly, there was a touch of Peep Show in the two guys having a competition to see who can go longest without peeing.  And even more so in the denouement of this storyline, featuring the pair of them pissing into Jane Asher’s kitchen sink in full view of hostess and guests.  It was pretty much as entertaining as that sounds, and took quite a lot of contrivance to arrive at a mediocre payoff.

There was a subplot concerning Tom’s daughter, who Jane Asher tries to hook up with her son.  Tom gets his oar in and suggests via Facebook that his daughter is up for fun 24/7 in an attempt to hasten a tryst, not least because the bloke earns £80,000.  And at the party, Tom is assumed to be poking fun at the son: the lad has just had dental cosmetic surgery and talks with a lisp and, wouldn’t you know it, Tom too is talking funny having burned his mouth eating a toasted tomato sandwich.

There’s nothing especially bad about The Old Guys, but there wasn’t much that shone about it either.  Which is a shame.  Maybe future episodes will do more with the characters than was on display in this first story.  Historically, some sitcoms take at least a couple of series to hit their stride, which has always baffled me: what is it that makes them harder to create than any other form of scripted entertainment?  And what am I going to watch in the meantime while waiting for The Old Guys to shape up into something altogether more compelling than its opening shot?