There's a lot wrong with BBC Three - not least endless repeats of Two Pints of Lager. But a recent good programme is Pulling.
We follow Donna (29 turning 30) who decides on the eve of her wedding to dump her fiancé Karl and is forced to move in with two friends Karen (who shags anything that moves and is a primary school teacher) and Louise (who's just a little bit creepy). It stars Sharon Horgan (seen recently as Rob Brydon's producer in Annually Retentive) who's also the series' co-writer.
Some of the situations may be a bit hackneyed, but you can see believable and recognisable characters all around, and there are some very funny lines each time around. Episode three had a wonderful monologue from Karen who runs into someone she may know and might have had some, umm, "dealings" with.
I trust that this will make the move to BBC Two at some point in the new year.
(I just watched episode three - and was just smiling at the denouement - only to be brought back home to earth by the voiceover saying "coming up next, a double bill of Two Pints of Lager!")
It took me a while, but over the weekend I caught up with The State Within. I saw the first four parts a fortnight or so ago in a marathon Sunday morning session, and really got into it. Of course you can't really buy Jason Isaacs as a gung-ho ambassador who gets to run around town ditching his security left, right and centre. But the complicated plot had enough twists and turns to keep everyone going. From the snarly Ben Daniels playing the seemingly duplicitous Nicholas Brockhurst to Neil Pearson playing the slimey political type, and Lennie James (soon to be seen as a very dodgy looking character in Jericho) as the death-row convict Luke Gardener, all the characters were great. There strong female characters too led by Eva Birtwhistle as the human rights liaison (do they have that sort of thing in the US Embassy?) Jane Lavery to Sharon Gless' Madeleine Albright Secretary of State and Genevieve O'Reilly's Caroline Hanley.
The series ran over six weeks, much as the wonderful State of Play did a couple of years ago, but the complexities of the plot may have better served the series if it had ran over three weeks in two hour chunks.
It may not have garnered the ratings (as Andrew Collins has noted - he liked it too), but I'm happy to see more of this kind of stuff.