TV Week: Demons, Plus One and QI

They're aided by Luke's feisty best-friend Ruby (Holliday Grainger) and blind concert pianist Mina Harker (Zoë Tapper), who can receive psychic impressions by touching people and objects. She's also in charge of the ancient Van Helsing library (or "Stacks"), rather oddly. In-between his demon-slaying duty, Luke struggles to lead a normal teenage life of exams, driving lessons, etc. It sounds like a jolly, if derivative, fantasy romp -- but a crucial lack of intelligence and creativity makes it impossible to care.

On paper, the casting is excellent: Life On Mars' Glenister has the mentor role (sharing a name and initials with Buffy's scholarly guide Rupert Giles); Echo Beach's Cooke is the Potter-ish hero with snake-like reflexes and a tendency to take his top off; Waterloo Road's Grainger is the cute, trendy best-friend; and Survivors' Tapper is the enigmatic aide (her second psychic character in as many months, after Affinity.) The first episode also guest-starred Mackenzkie Crook as villain Gladiolus Thrip; a beak-nosed, bouffant-haired, teddyboy, with a vendetta against the Van Helsing family.

It's a hastily-assembled show with a patchwork approach to appealing to genre fans, while forgetting that what made the likes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer work beyond its effects and photogenic cast. Buffy had a theme, subtext and sharp scripts written by people who knew the horror/sci-fi genre inside-out. Demons is all surface-level polish and hollow insides. The kind of thing your dad would think is cutting-edge fantasy. ITV1, SAT, 7.45PM.

Last year's Comedy Showcase season on Channel 4 has proved a masterstroke, with three of the broadcast pilots picked up for full series. The Kevin Bishop Show was first out of the traps, and the Steven Mangan-starring Free Agents is coming soon, but next we have PLUS ONE; a rom-com about a luckless singleton stuck in the shadow of his ex's impending marriage to a minor celebrity (Duncan from Blue, played by Duncan from Blue.)

Interestingly, the lead role of Rob Black has been re-cast, with nerdy Daniels Mays replacing schlubby Rory Kinnear because of the latter's theatre commitments. Or did someone deem Kinnear too unattractive as the lead in a sitcom, or that it was too far-fetched to have him competing against hunky Dunc? Clearly, someone thought the positive audience reaction to Plus One was based on the concept, not our unlucky hero.

Regardless, this amalgamation of The Worst Week Of My Life and a Farrell Brothers movie works surprisingly well. Mays is a likeable replacement lead and the first episode zipped by in an entertaining flash. It's uncouth and implausible at times (engineering some social embarrassments for Rob that stretch credibility to snapping point), but there's enough good to counteract the bad. The only problem Plus One will come up against is its limited shelf-life (isn't the story over when Linsey and Duncan's wedding day arrives?) and the fact our "hero" Rob is actually a manipulative schemer who should grow-up and get over his split. CHANNEL 4, FRI, 10PM.

Stephen Fry's comedy-quiz QI has become so popular that it's transferred from BBC2 to BBC1 (a la Have I Got News For You), but otherwise it's business as usual for the comedians given schoolboy roles, with Fry as the indubitable headmaster and Alan Davies the class dunce. Tradition dictates that, as the sixth series, the trivia revolves around the letter "F". Of course, things aren't particularly strict, and conversations veer off into random, surreal tangents. The only disappointing thing with QI (exemplified her with Rob Brydon's appearance) is a tendency to make smutty, schoolboy jokes usually involving sexual innuendo. There's nothing wrong with such comedy, but QI is guilty of spending far too long giggling at crudities, when the real gems of the show are to be found elsewhere. BBC1, FRI, 9PM.