Recently in The Student one sardonic reviewer (me, as it happens) observed that putting a show on ITV2 is admitting to failure even before the opening credits of the first show roll. While this is about as close as you get in the world of television to an E=MC2 iron law, there is one brilliant exception to it.

Admist the dross that clogs the ITV 2 (and 1 and 3 and 4) schedules came in 2009 a little gem of comedy that has gone almost entirely unnoticed, despite its famous-ish cast and string of celebrity guest stars. FM follows the staff of Skin, a small-time indie radio station, with Chris O’Dowd (The IT Crowd) as a grumpy failed club DJ, Kevin Bishop (he hadn’t appeared in much before, but Wikipedia lists him as playing ‘gay drugged man’ in an episode of Peep Show) as fading former boy band hearthrob Dom and Nina Sosanya (Teachers) as the station’s no-nonsense producer, Jane. Whilst I assumed that ITV had pretty much given up on comedy years ago, the writing here is tight and the humour sharp and Inbetweenersy (“We split up over artistic disagreements. I shagged his mum. He disagreed.”) with some brilliant studio banter between the three main characters. Also a real band appears every episode, providing an unexpected but always welcome interlude, with the Guillemots, The Wombats and The Charlatans taking their turns at playing what feels like a gig in your living room.

More often than not, guest stars are a bad idea: they tend to upset the ecology of a show and prove an unwelcome intrusion from the real world into fiction that the writers have spent time and effort building up (see Ricky Gervais in The Simpsons), but FM gets it right.

The more that I think about it, the more ill-fitting FM seems for ITV 2. There’s something really quite innovative and dynamic about it, but putting it on there at 11pm meant that hardly anybody saw it, and those who did probably didn’t appreciate it: it’s the equivalent of putting hardcore porn on BBC 4 or interrupting Babestation with The History of the National Grid.

That said, ITV does appear to have noticed that it has something decent on its hands and has decided on a second series. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get bumped for the +1 showing of Strictly I’m an X Factor Celebrity on Ice.