BBC Four's new embassy-based comedy

All good sitcom characters are trapped, so Julian Assange’s situation, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy with a potential death sentence hanging over him, is an inspired bases for a comedy.

Throw in a cast that includes Ben Miller, Dustin Demri-Burns and Kayvan Novak, and you have a promising set-up.

But while there’s enough to enjoy in Asylum, the first episode of this new BBC Four comedy turns out to be fairly predictable. Miller’s whistleblower character, Dan Hern, basically has a sense of his own importance unshared by the rest of the embassy staff, who are forced to endure his constant presence. And pretty much every joke revolves around his serious-minded posturing falling on deaf ears.

The only reason he was granted asylum is that the El Rico ambassador’s camp, party-loving son, Raphael (Novak) wanted some of his brief notoriety to rub off on him. But a year after hitting the headlines Hern – who is pointedly Not Assange, even commenting that he wishes he were the white-haired Australian for clarity’s sake – is old news.

Demri-Burns’s character, Ludo Backslash, offers a bit more potential to be an exaggerated egotist, perhaps in the vein of 30 Rock’s Tracey Jordan, although in this series opener he is simply an irritant to Hern’s sense of propriety. He’s a hedonist interred for pirating movies, compared to Hern’s high-minded motives of exposing CIA torture.

The plot of episode one centred on a misunderstanding straight out of Sitcom Writing 101, which any moderately alert viewer will see coming as soon as the seed is planted. In fact, the show is pretty much by-the-numbers stuff, despite its brilliantly timely premise.

-by Steve Bennett

Review date: 9 Feb 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett