Last night there were 32 visitors online, immediately after the show finished (the visible visitor count is playing up right now). Twitter search for Campus also showed a lot of very positive feedback.

Caitlin Moran in the Times loved it.

Finally, Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase returns — essentially The X Factor for sit-coms. Every week there’s a new pilot, with the most popular being commissioned for a whole series — before, presumably, having a nervous breakdown and being admitted to the Priory.

First up for the phone vote was Campus — the new project from the Green Wing team: essentially Green Wing but set in a red-brick university, not a hospital. The show is already so well-formed that finding it having to audition for a series seems bizarre — like Patti Smith turning up to an X Factor audition in Cardiff, and doing Piss Factory to a gob-smacked Simon Cowell.

The writer/director/producer Victoria Pile has two trademark techniques: creating worlds where a horrible, dark surreality keeps oozing through the cracks; and characters who take childlike gestures to extremes — walking past a shelf and pushing all the books off with a triumphal air, stealing lipstick from a handbag and putting it on during a conversation, shouting “Shut!” at a door that’s already shutting.

Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character — a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn — wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.

The 2007 Comedy Showcase resulted in series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents, from which The Kevin Bishop Show has made it to a second series — making it very much the Leona Lewis of the enterprise. But Campus is far superior stuff to Kevin Bishop. It makes Kevin Bishop look like ... David Sneddon. Campus — it’s a yes from me. I’m putting you through to Boot Camp.