After the madness of the Masterchef final, I wanted something easy-going and lighthearted. I got exactly what I wanted with Empty, a new sitcom starring Rab C Nesbitt’s Gregor Fisher (recently seen to great comic effect in Oliver Twist) and Lord Of The Rings’ Billy Boyd as two men who work in a house clearance business in Glasgow.

Each week, these two go to new, recently departed people’s houses, and slowly and steadily clear them out. This gives the show new places and situations to go to every week. It’s a grim business for sure, clearing out the dead’s possessions, but doesn’t the best comedy series always have darker, pathosy sides to it? I think so, and this macabre edge gives Empty an interesting premise.

Forget the death aspect of the series, Empty is pretty much about two blokes chatting random stuff to each other, winding each other up and generally reflecting on how boring their lives are. Tony (Boyd) is forever poking fun at jacky (Fisher) and he reacts in the same way Homer Simpson does to Bart – he chases him around the house, throwing things at him, and shouting things like “why I oughta!” at him.

They’re a likeable pair, and to make their clearing-up jobs go a bit quicker they also fantasise about naked women in the bathroom and re-enact scenes from their favourite films. Throughout the episode (I think it was was the first of the series) they muse on reality TV (Tony shows Jacky the routine he tried in The X Factor audition), life, death and everything else in between.

It’s all very lighthearted, fun and easy-going low-keyness. It didn’t make me laugh out loud, but it made me smile a lot (actually there was one line that made me laugh: “When the holes in my shoes get bigger… when do my shoes stop becoming shoes and start becoming just holes?”). This is more than most sitcoms and character-based comedy shows do these days.

I quite like comedies like this… just two blokes chatting. No hideously overblown premises or try-hard characters. Just good comedy actors, a half-decent script and… that’s it.

There was a plot of sorts running through this episode – they find a room in the house filled with beautifully-made model boats and become impressed with the deceased man who made them. Impressed that is until an elderly female friend of the dead guy turns up with a shifty-looking bloke. They wanted to take all the boats away, but Jacky and Tony, wanting to safeguard the dead man’s legacy, wouldn’t let them. A scuffle ensued and the boats were broken… they were stuffed with drugs of all kinds.

“We thought he was Gapetto from Pinocchio, but he was actually Tony Montana from Scarface.”