Catherine Ashmore
If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is compromised, you need something or someone off-centre to stand out from the crowd. In Barton Fink, it was a hotel corridor and what the Coen Brothers did with it; in BBC Two's Episodes, it's Tamsin Greig's low-key, ironic bewilderment. Here it takes the shape of a five-minute comic turn from Carrie Quinlan as Mancunian room service.