Out of Order feels like the sort of energetic, Friday night, post-pub series that television commissioners have been trying to claw back since the pre-streaming days, so I’m not sure why it is coming out on a Monday evening, second only to Sunday evening in the gloom stakes. It assembles Rosie Jones, Judi Love and Katherine Ryan, three of the biggest women in British comedy, into a Boygenius-style panel show supergroup. Trickily, it tasks them with making a brand-new format work, which is never easy; impressively, they pretty much pull it off.
Jones hosts, while Love and Ryan are the team captains, and the trio provide the raucous engine for the premise, which is all about testing whether first impressions and preconceptions are ever accurate. In this first episode, Ryan is paired with Chris McCausland, who makes the very funny and extremely valid point that they are getting a blind man in to judge people on how they look. Love is joined by Richard Osman, who, perhaps unexpectedly, proves the pepper to her salt, the cheese to her onion. If they don’t get their own chatshow on the back of this, Comedy Central isn’t doing its job.
