Mr & Mrs Smith

There's nothing particularly ground-breaking about the setting for Mr & Mrs Smith. Marriage/relationship sitcoms are an obvious staple of both TV and radio comedy, often with some rather forced twist on the family setup to make things interesting.

Mr & Mrs Smith doesn't have any unnecessary nonsense, nor the tacky punned title that I think it might get if it were a TV sitcom, it's just about a recently married couple going to counselling. The pilot was aired last week and the full series began on Tuesday.

It's a little difficult to have an opinion on the programme without having an opinion on the relationship between Will and Annabel because it forms the basis of the whole thing. I can't be the only listener secretly playing therapist during the episodes. The jokes are funny but there's also a secret pleasure in having a window on a relationship that's clearly in trouble, it's like the top-quality gossip you get to hear about your best friend's boyfriend's sister and her terrible love life, only in half-hour packages without the guilt.

In Annabelle, geeky Will has clearly bagged a normal (to quote the IT crowd). He needs to get back early from their romantic break to see Avatar and he claims to speak three languages: schoolboy French, conversational Klingon and Elvish. I have met a LOT of Wills. By contrast, Annabelle has more usual - if blown-out-of-proportion - concerns like impressing people at work and getting upgrades at the hotel.

I don't think it will surprise anyone that I find myself identifying far more with Will than with Annabelle. What worries me is that I'm not sure I'm supposed to, I don't think he's intended to be the reasonable one in the relationship. But I think this gets to the heart of the one issue I have with Mr & Mrs Smith: I just can't understand how these people would be married. Dating, yes. Engaged, maybe. But married? I don't buy it, I can't see what they possibly have in common.

I know a lot of geeks and the one thing we don't do well, if at all, is hide our geekiness. It might be possible to date a person for a short time without encountering the sort of obsession and social awkwardness that Will has but it usually comes to the surface pretty quickly. So, with that in mind, I can't understand how a 'normal' like Annabelle would have married someone like Will, only to almost constantly find fault with him after the fact. What happened to loving people because of their faults rather than in spite of them?

Anyway, once you've bought into the premise that Will and Annabelle are married, Mr & Mrs Smith is entertaining and well worth a listen. I'm particularly curious to see if it'll make it to a second series or whether Annabelle will just run off with the multi-lingual, jet-setting therapist.