WE ARE NOT ALONE

Dave, 9pm

Imagine if we got an answer from all of those probes that we send into space, welcoming alien life to Earth. And then imagine if they suddenly turned up, invaded us and decided to run the whole of Great Britain from the small town of Clitheroe, Lancashire. That is the premise of We Are Not Alone, a promising feature-length comedy pilot from Ghosts stars Laurence Rickard and

Ben Willbond.

It stars Declan Baxter as Stewart, a mildmannered local planning officer who finds himself hired as the human liaison of the British Gu’un government. At the top is Vicki Pepperdine’s Traitor (a name she unwisely adopts when she can’t decide between the names Tracy and Peter), a genial alien who just wants humans to like her and her fellow aliens. Her deputy, however, is GorDAN (the delightfully unhinged Mike Wozniak), who would rather throw humanity out of an airlock. And then there’s Greggs (The Inbetweeners’ Joe Thomas), who just wants Stewart to be his mate. Most of the biggest laughs come from the aliens’ outside perspective. They are baffled, for example, by our penchant for driving cars that poison us, or the male species’ “third finger”. It is no Ghosts, but it is certainly playful enough to warrant a full series. Stephen Kelly