Target practice

Ever since the days of Tony Hancock, many of the best British sitcoms — from Dad’s Army to Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp to The Royle Family — have featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in an increasingly mad world. The frankly subversive twist in W1A (BBC2, Thursday) is that the middle-aged man in question might well be right. As the BBC’s Head of Values, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) is surrounded by any number of jargon-spouting younger colleagues whose apparent aim is not to let anybody realise how stupid they are — or at least it would be if they realised it themselves.

Head of Output Anna Rampton, for example, obviously believes that making statements like ‘We do it well, but we could do it better than well’ will help her chances of being appointed to the new BBC post of Director of Better. Her rival Matt Taverner, the Generic Head of Drama and/or Comedy, doesn’t actually read the scripts he’s discussing, but knows he can always fall back on wondering if they should be more multicultural.