Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Humour is a matter of taste. A joke that has one audience howling with laughter can leave another simply howling. The same applies to television comedy. Which is why it's not surprising that the reviews for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Four's new spoof doc, Twenty Twelve, were mixed. I was in the equivocal camp.

It had a good cast (Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes) and a nice central idea - spoof fly-on-the-wall doc following the team in charge of delivering the London 2012 Olympics. And if contradiction is at the heart of a good sitcom, it had that too, in the shape of a man in charge of Olympic delivery whose own wife tells him he is "completely useless". But to paraphrase the great Eric Morecambe; they had all the right ingredients, but hadn't added them in the right order.

The result was a diverting half-hour of pleasant enough telly that lacked the bite of its two most obvious antecedents: The Office and The Thick of It. There were some nice lines. The artist was introduced as being "best known for gaining a reputation". And the boss (Hugh Bonneville) lamented having lost an argument to his wife conceded that her point of view "does make a lot of sense and it's not easy to see a way round that".

But two good lines don't make a spring hit comedy. Maybe the problem with the first episode was a lack of spoof in the doc. The characters were familiar as Stephen Bayley - the man who was creative director of the Millennium Dome project . But perhaps they were too recognisable, to the point of cliche: mere pastiches as opposed to fully-fledged human beings with flaws that are universal.

I thought the characters lacked opinions, which are the essential spice of life and comedy. David Brent had an opinion about everything as did Malcolm Tucker. What would Curb Your Enthusiasm be without Larry David's opinionated persona or Basil Fawlty stripped of his black and white view of the world?

Opinions are the writer's device for revealing the true character, which in turn sets up dramatic tension and gives the audience something to react to. The only person who had an opinion in Twenty Twelve was the "straight-talking" Yorkshireman, but he only got a couple of lines and I'd heard them (or very similar) before.

Then again, the show did have one vital comic ingredient on its side: timing. Last night's first episode of Twenty Twelve revolved around an artist-designed clock counting down to the Games, while on the very same day the real . The TV show got that right. And their London 12 graphic is better.