Complaints rose before the series had begun. Gareth McLean said, "I'm not sure if it speaks more of the desperate barrel-scraping at the idea-free zone that is Channel 4 or the blunting of our critical faculties and the ease with which we're impressed nowadays concomitant with the devaluing of the terms "genius" and "hero", but this is some sort of joke, right? Are we seriously meant to believe that Gervais et al. are heroes? Unless, of course, the measure of comedy heroism is the amount of merchandise you can shift."
