I gave up on it partly because I never laughed once in that ten minutes and partly because my son, who is usually a very good judge of these things, sighed heavily about eight minutes in and went off to play on the interweb. I did only watch ten minutes mind, and maybe Meet The Magoons got really good in the eleventh minute and in that case, mea culpa.

But Jesus, what I saw was leaden direction, with precious seconds passing that seemed like hours between the "gags". And the better gags seemed over-familiar mainly because they’d been lifted wholesale from other shows. Honestly, I do welcome C4 taking a flyer at producing "ethnic " comedy but the whole thing felt way under-cooked. There probably is the kernel of a good idea there but it needed a lot more work.

Which in a not completely contrived way, leads me to look at Still Game yet again.

I read somewhere that the two principal characters, Victor and Jack, have been developed over about ten years by the actors and writers, Hemphill and Kiernan, and that makes sense. Still Game issued forth as a fully realised, complex and surreal slice of Glasgow life from episode one. You just "got" it from the off.

And lest I be accused of ethnic bias because I’m not Indian, I’m not an Irish Catholic either, and I got "Father Ted" immediately as well and for the same reason.

With the first episode of Ted, we were introduced to a sit-com that had been immaculately crafted beforehand and was "finished", if you know what I mean.

I read the first few minutes of Meet The Magoons as a very rough and not at all ready gag-generation session that had somehow made it to the production stage without a script editor taking a grip of it.

To end on a positive note, I’m really pleased to see that, in this series of Still Game, Hemphill and Kiernan have given Isa more to do. Sorry, if you live in Foreign because this bit will mean nothing to you, but Isa’s face, in last week’s show, when she wrongly deduces that Victor and Jack are gay, was a picture. The actress playing Isa really can act and I love her to death.