I love jokes in bad taste, but even I flinched at some of the one-liners in Bugsplat!, the new military sitcom from Channel 4.

This is a very black comedy set in a battered old airfield somewhere in the English countryside, where a lone peace campaigner sits beyond the wire fence bundled up in scarves and woolly mittens with Mandela, her Labrador, and some colourful posters.

Within the airfield the personnel are standard comedy RAF types. There is the Wing Commander who's trying to cling onto dignity and order; there's a female pilot, Lexi, who has to be butch and macho in order to stay ahead of the men, and so she laughingly insists she could drop the bomb on Hiroshima and 'still sleep like a baby', and then there are two posh, bumbling fools, James and Peter, who squabble about which of them is the best pilot.

Having served in Afghanistan, they're now back in the dreary safety of an English airfield from where they pilot drones across the desert. Often they have a flicker of guilt at conducting deadly operations from a desk, and this provides the opportunity for the show's most tasteless joke: 'I'm sitting in an office killing people. I may as well be working for Haringey Social Services'.

I admit that made me sit up and pay attention. Things had been quite ordinary until this line jumped out of the screen and punched me in the face. Could this be something special, then?

Not really, as the show revealed itself to be quite tepid and flat, but punctuated every now and then with lines which weren't so much funny as really quite bold and cheeky. That's to be admired, but it's to be admired even more when they can make you laugh as well as squirm.

As the desk-bound pilots crowd round their screen and aim the drone at their target, a well-known Taleban organiser, Lexi blasts him - bugsplat! - and yells, 'You won't be marrying any nine year olds!' As she rejoices in her fresh kill, the nervous Wing Commander hangs over her shoulder to remind them to try and avoid killing 'secondaries and collaterals and non-combatants. You know….people'.

This is a world of slick and easy killing and the only way the pilots can sleep at night is through 'self abuse and Temazepam'. But at least they know they've killed one of the bad guys today, so congratulations are in order until it's revealed they got the wrong man. Their mild disgruntlement turns to horror when they learn Wikileaks have obtained the footage of their drone strike, as well as the audio recordings of them making bad jokes and cheering ('bugsplat!') so the Wing Commander has to beg help from a heartless PR woman who can 'spin' this for them and turn it into a triumph.

Once the adverts were extracted from this sitcom it was only 22 minutes long, so maybe it's unfair to dismiss it when this is its first outing and we only had a fragment, but it was all just too mild and flat, with a blazing, cheeky joke thrown in every now and then. Indeed, the occasional bold lines just highlighted how limp everything else was.