Poor Mathew Horne and James Corden, they’ve been having a bit of a tough time of it, lately, haven’t they? Once media darlings thanks to Gavin and Stacey, they have since been on the receiving end of one hell of a backlash. Or is it less of a backlash and more that Gavin and Stacey is good and their sketch show is poor? Probably a bit of both. Anyway, I’m a contrary little thing, so I came to this episode looking for the positives. Question is, did I find any?

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I tried, really I did. I like the guys and some of the vitriol that has been flung their way recently has been over the top to say the least. However, the fact is that a lot of the sketches in their BBC Three show are underworked and overlong.

But it was positives I was looking for, and regardless of what other critics may say, there are a (very) few. The recurring sketch in which extreme situations such as war zones and armed robberies are interrupted by an all-hands-on-deck search for a Nokia charger (“no, the new little one”) makes me giggle, though I’m not entirely sure why.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that the sketches I prefer are actually those in which James Corden plays the straight man – he’s a really good comic actor, and as such I like watching his reactions to Horne’s camp weatherman, or office idiot who always has a dull story to tell about getting smashed the night before.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much positive spin as I can put on the programme though. Those Aspinall infomercials are so bad as to be really quite infuriating, and I hate to think that anybody found the electric chair/electric wheelchair “mix-up” last week even vaguely amusing. Other sketches just need a bit more variation – the modern-day version of The Fast Show’s office joker Colin Hunt, for example (he even has the same curly ginger wig!) literally does the same thing every time he appears.

But while us critics find real problems with the show, the audience figures are holding up, and a second series has already been commissioned. Let’s just hope that Horne and Corden reward that loyalty with an improved hit rate.