[Shaun]

loved GW.

starts on C4 soon

Campus first appeared as part of 4's Comedy Showcase season, and now makes its full series premiere. It's set in the hotbed of academic mediocrity that is Kirke University, with the mercurial yet stubby Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe at the helm.

According to Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe, Kirke University's bank balance and academic reputation both need a bit of a boost. Reactions to this news from members of staff range from nonchalance to panic, but Jonty, titillated by his mousy maths lecturer Imogen Moffat's success, insists they all take a leaf out of her best-selling book.

[Omah]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_%28TV_series%29

The pilot received a mixed reception when it was broadcast.

Jane Simon in the Daily Mirror wrote that: "There are some very funny moments but the staff at Kirke are perhaps a little too eccentric for their own good. It's as if the challenge was how weird can we make these people and still have them breathe oxygen? Vice-chancellor Jonty (Andy Nyman) comes on like a more megalomaniac David Brent, while womanising English lecturer Matt Beer (think about it) and speccy maths star Imogen Moffat (Joseph Millson and Lisa Jackson) have big shoes to fill if they're to be Campus's answer to Guy [Secretan] and Caroline [Todd, characters from Green Wing]."

Sam Wollaston of The Guardian disliked Campus, saying: "Ah, I see, Campus (Channel 4) is taking that path: the offensive one. There's nothing wrong with that; offence can be good, if done artfully. There's plenty of it here - Jonty's bigotry and English literature lecturer Matt Beer's (comedy name, like beer mat, but the other way round!) sex pesting. There is talk of rape by pigs, and odd-shaped anal cavities that lead to odd-shaped stools. I'm just not convinced it is being done very artfully. It seems more like offence for the sake of offence. Compare it with the beautifully crafted filth of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It. If he is the Michelangelo of offence, this is Rolf Harris."

However, Caitlin Moran of The Times praised it saying she hoped a full series would be made. She wrote of the pilot: "Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character - a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn - wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw."

Perhaps the series will be better .....

[Shaun]

Just saw another advert...I can't say I'm looking forward to it that much now :/ looks less barking-mad, just...angry-mad.