This is an interesting programme with a lot of potential. I’m not sure how funny it is, but as I said, it’s an interesting programme with a lot of potential so stay tuned.

Zawe Ashton from Fresh Meat plays Katherine, a newly-divorced, stylish high-flyer in a central London immigration department who finds herself exiled to a Northampton outpost that she helped to create.

It’s her worst nightmare. And then it gets worse. Her new boss Danny (Sacha Dhawan) is played an an old underling, who is hopelessly unqualified but landed the job thanks to – don’t tell Andrew Lawrence – positive discrimination and a diversity programme. Danny might be passably competent if he laid off the cocaine and booze binges but I’m not sure. It’s never a good sign when you risk penile injury pissing through a metal letterbox when you could have just as easily pissed against the wall. 

It is not just the storyline that makes this different, the tone is positively weird too. It reminds me of an ancient BBC medical series called A Very Peculiar Practice that also had a comic but non-comedic feel. The dialogue here, written by DC Moore, is almost hyper-naturalistic, to the extent that people get words wrong when they try to sound clever, using, for instance “facilitate” when “help” would have done the trick.

There are occasional fantasy sequences too – early on Katherine looks at a wine list and it says “marriage is for arseholes” on the front – which facilitate, sorry, help, to make this unsettlingly odd. 

By the end of the first episode Katherine was sharing a flat with her London boss and the office mouse (a woman, not a rodent). She also had tiny specks of blood on her hands. Possibly to symbolise some kind of stigmata? Who knows. I’m not quite sure what was going on, but I’ll certainly keep watching in the hope of finding out.

Tuesdays, C4, 10pm. Watch it on catch-up here.