Bugsplat!, TV review: The cast and crew sound promising but this black comedy lacks chemistry

The Channel 4 show is based around the confines of a drone pilot headquarters

Missed opportunity: Bugsplat! is set in a Portacabin on a British RAF base (Channel 4)

The setting of Bugsplat! has a lot of potential in the black comedy stakes: based around the confines of a drone pilot headquarters in a Portacabin on a British RAF base, populated by incompetent idiots who wanted to be back in Afghanistan.

"It's been nearly six months since I got to blow something up," said pilot Lexi (Lauren O'Neil), salivating at the thought of dropping a bomb, regardless of the "collaterals".

The cast and crew also sounded promising; it's written and directed by Guy Jenkin (Ballot Monkeys, Drop the Dead Donkey) and includes Hugh Skinner (currently on our screens as W1A's idiotic intern, Will) and Vincent Franklin (The Thick of It, Twenty Twelve).

And it made use of that classic war comedy trope used so masterfully in Black Adder and Dad's Army: managerial incompetence. The team accidentally blew up its own source instead of a wanted terrorist, and it was left to the new intelligence liaison, officer, Gina (Fiona Button) to "rebucket" the blunder as a PR success story.

Opportunities to show the lighter side of drones' surveillance capabilities were not missed - James (Skinner), using official resources to capture an ex-girlfriend in Afghanistan's boobs on camera, for example, but the laughs didn't come.

It could be something good. After all, the life of a drone pilot is one in the public consciousness. It was the subject of last year's Good Kill, staring Ethan Hawke, as well as Grounded, currently running at the off Broadway People's Theatre with Anne Hathaway playing a troubled drone pilot. Over here, there have been protestor arrests this year at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, the home of UK-manned drone operators.

There should have been opportunity for comedy. But, something was missing; it wasn't dark enough or with memorable-enough characters. It was lacking in that specific chemistry. And whatever the drone caught going on in the bedroom between Mo (Sacha Dhawan) and Lexi, didn't count.