Sorry Mel and Sue – as bungling hitmen you’ve missed the target

THAT’S quite a way to reveal your guest star. For the first half of Mel and Sue’s new sitcom, Hitmen (Sky1), their victim was cowering in the back of their blood-spattered Transit with a bag over his head.

Slowly he got bold enough, or bored enough, to chip in with a few remarks. By the time the inept contract killers had dumped their second body in the canal, he was getting quite chatty.

But I hadn’t begun to guess who the actor was, until almost at the end when Sue whipped the sack away, and everybody watching said, ‘Oh, that’s Jason Watkins.’

Imagine having the budget and the pulling power to get Jason Watkins, who has just starred in a Sunday night ITV blockbuster, and then leaving him in a van with his head in a bag.

Hitmen launched with a double bill, the second episode gueststarring Fleabag’s Sian Clifford as a crooked financier with an allergy problem. It’s a slick, dark comedy, a long way from Bake Off — there’s no saucy, baguette- shaped innuendos here. Instead, we get several gory executions.

But there’s a couple of problems. It’s on Sky, which means you’ll need a satellite or a Now TV account to watch. That’s no reason to criticise the show, but Mel Giedroyc and

Sue Perkins were noisily pious about their refusal to leave the publicly funded BBC when Bake Off moved to Channel Four.

Clearly, something has changed since then. Maybe there’s still ill feeling between Auntie and the girls over their dismal attempt to revive the Generation Game.

The other drawback is that, as Sky viewers will know, Hitmen isn’t original. Something similar has been done before, and much more lavishly, by Chris O’Dowd in Get Shorty. He and Sean Bridgers play a couple of Las Vegas killers who, after shooting a screenwriter and stealing his movie script, decide to become Hollywood producers.

If you’re going to rehash someone else’s idea, you’d better be prepared to execute your jokes as ruthlessly as a Mafia assassin with a quota to fill. Hitmen is too hit and miss: some gags were lethally funny; more were blanks.

Best of the lot was Watkins, demonstrating how a hostage with his arms tied behind his back can do a mean Riverdance.

The show can rely on Mel and Sue’s comic chemistry, playing versions of themselves: the sarky lesbian and her slightly dozy pal. Hitmen made me laugh in places but, like the victims, it can only do one of two things: run and run, or (much more likely) prove to be rather short-lived.

Spencer Jones, whom you might recognise for his Ricky Gervais impersonation in the

Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, was given the chance to try out his own sitcom with Mr Winner (BBC2).

Sadly, the idea behind this one wasn’t original either. Leslie Winner is a bumbling, socially inept misfit with an eternally optimistic streak. He is Mr Bean plus dialogue, and the more lines he had the less funny the gags became. He found a mechanical piano, and got a gig pretending to play it at an Italian restaurant. I’d love to see Rowan Atkinson doing that routine without words, all flamboyant mime and slapstick.

Mr Winner played down the physical comedy and tried to inject one-liners instead. The whole set- up became slow and laboured.

There’s the core of a funny series here. We’ll always root for a born loser, especially one whose sole ambition is to impress the girl he loves. But every line spoken out loud could have been cut, and the show would have been better for it.