Campus: Radio Times preview

The Radio Times has a great preview of tomorrow night's episode of Campus.

This is Channel 4's try-out zone for comedy pilots, a playpen for ideas that might, with the right encouragement, turn into fully-fledged IT Crowds or Green Wings. We start with Campus, and if there were a quicker way to describe it than "Green Wing in a university", I'd use it. Luckily, this isn't some low-grade knock off: it comes from the Green Wing team themselves, so expectations may be unreasonably high for Campus and it may not quite live up to them. Nothing could.

But that doesn't mean it isn't very funny and enjoyably strange. The characters feel fully formed and ready for a series: vice-chancellor Jonty de Wolfe is the most extreme, a power-crazed bully with a megaphone somewhere between David Brent and 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy, but with worse hair. In his sights is lazy English lecturer Matt Beer, who in turn is pursuing bespectacled maths star Imogen Moffat. There are brilliant moments and lovely sight gags: the scene with a clapping mechanical monkey just before the first ad break is a cracker.