Photo via Channel 4

I t Gets Worse is a terrific title. For a start, as when any shopworn phrase is put in an italicised spotlight, the experience is both refamiliarising and alienating. It sounds right, but do people actually say that? Yes, they do: when you interrupt them in the middle of a long, embarrassing story, and they try to keep your attention by promising further humiliation or social gore to come: “No, no – it gets worse, it gets worse .” It conveys both the atmosphere and shape of this series, a very funny if dimly lit story about confused young lives, chronicled as one long, unravelling farce.

Leo Reich – the writer and star of It Gets Worse , and a rising star in stand-up comedy – has been keen to stress that his is not a generational sitcom, but it’s doing a very good impression of one.…