Blessed is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most excruciatingly unfunny sitcom I have ever had the misfortune to see. Twice.

It's quite an achievement to strip Ardal O'Hanlon of his capacity to be funny, but Ben Elton has done just that. It's bad enough that O'Hanlon's character spouts large chunks of Elton's stand-up routine, but so do all the other characters. Having Mel Giedroyc read Elton's script turns her, uncannily, into a female version of Chris Barry's Gordon Brittas character. Dressing her character in a milk stained nightie (two large damp patches around her breasts) isn't even funny once, let alone funny for two whole episodes.

The whole thing tries to pass off the most cliched, abysmal baby jokes as being hugely comic, and sports the "clever" device of having the characters play a game of "most appropriate song" at random moments (in which Ben Elton demonstrates how clever he is, that he knows all these songs AND the person that wrote them).

Perhaps I'm too close to the subject matter, but how anyone could find this amusing is beyond me. The BBC really need to find some new comedy writers. Pretty much every recent BBC SitCom has been utterly abysmal ("The Green, Green Grass", and "According to Bex" to name but two, even if the later did have Jessica Stevenson in it).

Maybe it's time to write a zombie SitCom and pitch it to the BBC? People liked Shaun of the Dead…