TV review: Bad Santas

If you've never seen him in irreverent action in the deliciously dark comedy, check it out - it's on Channel Five this Sunday.

He plays a foul-mouthed, ill-tempered criminal who hires himself out as Father Christmas . . . not because he's been infected by the season of goodwill, but because the big red suit gives him the ideal cover for breaking into shopping centre safe rooms.

Now I'm not suggesting for a minute that the subjects in the first episode of Channel Four's intriguing two-part experiment were cut from the same cloth, but they weren't exactly a magical sleigh ride away.

There was hippy traveller 'Johnny Sausage' who appeared to have personal hygiene and drink problems; bankrupt Brian who had drifted from his family; former armed robber Frank who spent half his life in jail; retired trucker Steven, who's been on the sick for years; and 'Tiny Tim', an ex-squaddie who also had a prison past.

Their objective? To see if they could shrug aside the 100 criminal convictions they had amassed between them, and graduate from 'Santa School'.

If they thought all it was going to take was a bright red suit, woolly beard, and cushion stuffed up their jumpers, they were soon in for a shock.

Having enrolled in one of the UK's most successful Santa schools (yes, apparently there really is more than one, and it's very competitive), they found a team taking their work very seriously.

Chief elf was frustrated actor James Lovell, an un-nervingly jovial glass-half-full luvvie, desperate to prove that people from the wrong side of the tracks could pull off a Santa costume with confidence, learn the lingo, and become au fait with this year's most-wanted toys.

Perhaps most importantly of all, he reckoned these people deemed unemployable by many businesses could come up with convincing answers to kids' trickiest questions . . . without scaring the living daylights out of them.

That may seem like a lot of hoops to jump through for a position that will probably only last a month, not to mention something of a publicity gimmick for his Ministry of Fun company, but the pupils soon had their minds focused by money.

And little wonder. Santa in a department store grotto can expect to earn between £140 and £200 a day, we were told, while those hired for corporate jobs could pocket as much as £500.

There's nothing like the lure of big bucks to persuade macho men that it's worth the ritual humiliation. And there was plenty of that.

Taking folk out of their comfort zones and dropping them into fish-out-of-water scenarios in this fashion is classic reality TV fare. But five blokes in saggy jeans and ill-fitting T-shirts waltzing round a classroom in a white beard, bellowing a rather unconvincing 'ho-ho-ho', owed more to Monty Python than any kind of meaningful social experiment. It would have been nice to find out more about our famous five much earlier on. From the brief, belated interviews we were afforded, several of them had genuinely heart-rending background stories which could have given the programme more heart.

By the close of play, two of the Bad Santas had been given their marching orders. Tiny Tim was counted out after a CRB check, and Bacardi-swilling Johnny had rather too much of the Billy Bob Thorntons for his tutors' liking.

Will any of the remaining three shine in a grotto of their own? We'll find out when the show concludes at 9pm tonight.

Do you agree with Carl's opinion of Bad Santas? Have your say in the comment box below.