Did you have a nice day at the office, dear?

There are several ways of answering the age-old inquiry of "how was your day at the office, dear?" on your return home at the end of a day's work. Maloney would say that someone had attempted to kill him by pushing his car into a wall, that he'd stolen child porn tapes, and that he'd saved a colleague from being run down by a maniac on a motorbike. All of which isn't bad going for an admin manager conducting a time management study.

The reason for his exciting day away from his desk is Rose, an investigator with the Criminal Justice Review Agency. She has a boyfriend serving a life sentence, a diabetic condition she's careless about monitoring, and gives every appearance of having a bad hair day too. More importantly, the convicted murderer she's worked overtime to get acquitted whispers in her ear outside the court, "I did it, I killed her".

Rose determines to put him back behind bars, a plan curtailed when ordered to the basement to help Maloney with his paper work. This odd couple are thrown together on the trail of paedophiles, shadowy assassins, bent policemen and into a shed containing something you know is going to be very unpleasant as soon as one asks, "What's that smell?"

Rose And Maloney has the word pilot stamped all over it. It could work as a series. Sarah Lancashire, as a thorny Rose, and the always-excellent Phil Davis, as the buttoned-up Maloney, are a class act.

How different to life in The Office. For reasons of which I'm suitably ashamed I never caught the first, award-winning series of the comedy written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Marchant. The idea is simple - life in the office of a paper products company on Slough Trading Estate captured on camera by a reality TV documentary. Everyone will recognise the office types, although I'd better point out that my boss is nothing like the deeply embarrassing David Brent (Gervais again), the manager who puts his foot in it and then burrows ever deeper. The centre piece is a welcome meeting at which he addressed staff with a toe-curling speech, complete with bad impersonations and politically incorrect, off-colour joke involving royalty, that makes you squirm in your chair. The great thing is that, in his eagerness to please, he doesn't recognise he's making a fool of himself. "I was talking to someone on their level because I can communicate with all forms of life," he says, explaining his faux pas.