There are things I'd rather do than watch Sun Trap (BBC1) and one of them is watching paint dry. I do mean that literally: watching paint dry would be preferable. You could observe how the colour lightens as it dries, or perhaps it's been sloppily applied, in which case you can watch the gnarls and knobs the thick drops from into, and guess what shapes they might end up in. Yes, this is preferable to this awful new sitcom.

Terrible though Sun Trap might be, I watched it twice. On my first viewing I was simply bored and so, naturally, my attention wandered. I made tea, and then I sought Ginger Nuts to dip in the tea, then I got a taste for the biccies and went back into the kitchen for more. I checked my mobile for any tweets or texts. I looked at my nicely-painted wall and wished to God it was wet.

But no, this wandering attention simply isn't professional. I'd just have to watch Sun Trap again. But later, oh perhaps later. I can't go through it again so soon! I left it a few days then sat down again this evening to watch it a second time and it hadn't improved. The only thing which had altered was my sense of guilt. I must pay attention this time. I slapped my own wrist: bad TV critic!

Sun Trap has famous people in it, and this might mislead you into thinking it's good, but then the fact it's on so late at night suggests it's not. If it's so super-duper then why has it not been slapped proudly into the nice 9pm slot? Was something immovable on at 9pm tonight? No, it was a repeat of New Tricks. Well, no-one's going to mind if that's shuffled along to make way for the launch of a new sitcom - unless it's terrible. Which it is.

Bradley Walsh stars as Brutus, a former newspaper editor who's retired to run a bar on a sunny Spanish island. He's a chirpy, Cockney geezer type with slicked-back hair and he seems pleased with his new life until Woody (Kayvan Novak) suddenly appears. Woody is a former colleague, an investigative reporter who has antagonised some shady figures, so has fled to the island to lie low for a while. He 'lies low' by wearing painfully bright Hawaiian shirts and hanging around the bar being loud and annoying.

Then, for absolutely no reason, a slinky woman enters the bar and says that Brutus is needed to work on a case, and so the lads are summoned to meet her wealthy husband and tasked with finding his missing parrot. (I wish I was making this up, but I promise I'm not.)

There follows lots of silly puns about parrots, such as there being 'trouble in parrot-dise' and then, for reasons unknown, Woody disguises himself as a camp, foreign, interior decorator and pays a visit to the local vet (Jack Dee) to check if he knows where the missing parrot is, and he implores the vet to acknowledge 'zis rabbit ees as seeck as a parrot.'

Soon, Woody has infiltrated a bird sanctuary (oh, I'm exhausted) and has to pretend he can handle birds of prey. A massive, crooked vulture looks down on him and the camera cleverly captures the bird's nods and dips and jerks of the head which make it seem as though he's responding - you could say, as though he's acting - and it was mildly funny. So there, the actors were upstaged by a vulture.

This was simply a zany comedy without the zaniness. Perhaps it's supposed to be like BBC2's recent Pompidou, and the humour lies in its babyish simplicity. Maybe, but at least Pompidou had the decency to be broadcast at the childish hour of 6.30. This flapping, parrotty mess is on an adult hour, when big grown-ups are watching, but wishing they were watching paint dry instead.