Every season of Lead Balloon ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best seasons of Lead Balloon!

Rick fronts a lame government TV recycling campaign which backfires spectacularly. He falls out with café-owner Michael over a homemade fruitcake, and has a full-on row with unhinged baby-present shopkeeper Maureen.

Rubbish

A teaspoon crisis in the Spleen household leads Rick to petty theft. Meanwhile, Rick's sleep is disturbed by the paperboy, Wayne, who is very punctual, very noisy and has a brain the size of a walnut.

Wayne

Rick gets in a punch-up at an awards ceremony and ends up with a black eye. Marty is preparing to pitch a programme to the BBC and Michael is delighted that Rick has accidentally sponsored him a small fortune for his Skipathon.

£5000

Rick discovers he may have inadvertently killed one of Britain's best-loved entertainers, but he's preoccupied by a missing shoe-organiser. Meanwhile Rick prepares for upcoming appearance on topical news panel show Bullet in the News.

Allergic

Rick buys himself a scooter but worries that it makes him look gay. Hosting the Air Conditioning and Climate Control Awards goes disastrously, and a trip to the local dry cleaner ends in a heated argument.

Pistachio

Rick is publicly humiliated on TV by daytime chat-show host Adam Green. He also has an unfortunate encounter with an acquaintance at the gym, and Ben manages to destroy Rick's brand new DVD player by taking the back off.

Fatty

Tonight, Spleen appears on a quiz show as a guest celebrity and manages to talk a contestant out of winning a car. As usual it's Rick's hopeless attempts to lie and wriggle his way out of disaster that are the meat of the comedy. But the sauce is the fine supporting characters, notably gloomy eastern European home-help Magda (who tonight announces she is "unheppy" and wants to quit) and Spleen's hilariously vague teenage daughter Sam.

Giraffe

Rick becomes a local hero when he stops someone from committing suicide. He gets even more excited when, as a result, a TV executive agrees to come to dinner to talk about Rick s career. Magda prepares a traditional dish from her country for the evening, but when the guests finally arrive, Rick gets an unwelcome surprise

Hero

Three more points on his licence will be a ban, so he tries to persuade Mel, Marty and Madga to take the blame. Meanwhile, the local cafe owner railroads Rick into doing a fundraiser to save the town library. On top of it all, his daughter Sam has decided to get a tattoo.

Points

Rick's agent Mel's other client, ex-ice skating champ Gina Therese, has a new series coming up. Rick scoffs at the idea of an ice skater hosting a chat show until she asks him on as a guest. At home, Magda asks his advice on where to take her friend sightseeing when she visits England.

Idiot

The women in Rick's house are sick and he is forced to take over. Rick promises to field his partner Mel's work calls, but does more harm than good. Magda makes matters worse by arriving with her home made soup. All these distractions are stopping Rick from working with Marty on the game show they want to pitch to a broadcaster: 'Lying or Flying'.

Sick

Rick hosts an event for a pharmaceutical company. His stand-up goes down surprisingly well, but some of his ill-advised gags have far-reaching consequences.

Debacle

Rick gets a part in a film starring cinema legend Rita Stetler. Michael's father is a huge fan of Rita's and when Rick offers to get the star to sign his vintage poster he gets less than he bargained for.

Rita

Rick is sick of doing endless corporate gigs and accuses his writer Marty of lacking ambition, but a call from Hollywood changes everything. One of Mel's clients is going through a divorce, Ben and Sam start their own dog-walking business and Michael the cafe manager has started going to 'cuddle parties'.

Lucky

The episode opens with Rick at a celebrity charity auction trying to attract bids for the waistcoat of an ex-rock star. To start the bidding, he opens with a bit of £500 but with no takers, he ends up with it. Seeing Michael's father at the auction with a man, he assumes that they are a gay couple and resolves to protect Michael from this revelation.

Meanwhile Magda has had to move out of her flat as the gas boiler is faulty and moves into the Spleen household. It is clear that Michael believes his father's companion is solely a business colleague, however, when he relaunches his cafe as a chic restaurant, with less than complete success, it becomes clear that this is not the case; Rick's suspicions had been correct. The waistcoat bought by Rick turns out to be worth considerably more than he paid for it, but he has given it to his daughter, whose boyfriend has cut it up for a textiles project at college.

Magda has begun settling in, to the extent of infiltrating her fridge magnets and watching The Jeremy Kyle Show in the afternoons; meanwhile Rick has signed up for a television programme to trace his ancestry. Ben and Sam have formed a pop duo, "Ben and Sam." who are shown performing a track called "Tragic" on Youtube. Michael is inexplicably missing after the revelations about his father, but Rick and Marty find him working out in his garage, seemingly unconcerned. Rick has discovered his Scottish ancestry for the programme, but since his family name is Shaw, the confused Magda thinks he may be Chinese. It turns out, however, that his family history is not interesting enough for the television programme, and is rejected.

Panda

Rick has a bad day after doing poorly on a radio quiz and then finding out his email is broken and has to search for a fax machine. To make matters even worse his daughter and her boyfriend and rehearsing their music loudly which he isn't too keen on. His mindset changes though when he hears they could actually make some money out of it.

Rick decides to change his ways after an accident and will only see the positives in people from now on. He is pushed to the limits by Magda as she looks to offload some of his most treasured items, and Marty is sure it won't last. Elsewhere, Ben and Sam begin to move in a different direction and may have to split up.

Karma

Rick is forced to go and see a play which turns out worse than he could've imagined as the writer used to be the same level as Rick. He is happier though, to learn that his daughter is single once again until he realises who her latest love interest is.

Spikey

Rick and Marty have to make extra room around the house when Mel has to work from home. Rick is annoyed by Marty's liking of Mel's assistant and the constant disruptions, until he realises he might be able to get a job through Mel.

Mistake

Rick is looking forward to spending a quiet Christmas at home with Mel. It will be a well-earned break from the challenging acting role he is currently immersed in - playing the part of Mr Smee in a panto. Marty is no fan of pantomime, or of Christmas in general, and plans to head off for some winter sun - preferably to a country where carol-singing is punishable by death. Meanwhile, Michael has fallen in love at first sight with a chat room friend named Zoe and is already planning to propose on their first date. Ben and Sam are spending the holidays together, accompanied by Sam's gift to Ben of "homemade" mince pies. As for Magda, plans to return home to spend Christmas with her family are called off in favour of a week of mourning when her country's president dies.

Nuts

Rick's career is at an all-time low: even his idea of writing a novel gets stuck on page one. So when a Sunday newspaper wants to do an 'At Home With' feature about his partner Mel, Rick naturally tries to muscle in on the action. But when he decides that having a pet pig would look good in the photos, Rick proves that if nothing else, he's the prize-winning author of his own downfall.

Rick lands a job as a presenter on the Bargain Channel - it's Britain's premier shopping channel, as he points out to anyone who will listen. For once, his new job impresses surly East-European help Magda, who is a big fan of the show. His writing partner Marty and local cafe owner Michael are not so easily convinced, but Rick is determined that he's finally found something he's good at.

Meanwhile, Rick's daughter Sam and her boyfriend Ben are allegedly looking for work - without ever getting up from the sofa.

Dead

Rick's new job as a presenter on The Bargain Channel is going well but after his writing partner Marty takes a shine to his co-presenter Donna, Rick is not happy. Clive is on the warpath wanting a refund for an ornamental windmill that his mother bought from The Bargain Channel. Rick's behaviour at a funeral sees him getting into trouble and threatens to kill off his career.

Shoddy

Rick is at his lowest ebb. With no other work on offer, he decides to set up his own stand-up comedy workshop. But the first week's class attracts just five students. Worse still, the second session includes a new wannabe comic - deranged cafe owner Michael. A disastrous session on how to deal with heckling backfires spectacularly, but hope is on the horizon - in the form of an earnest council executive, Libby.

Meanwhile Magda is trying to claim compensation after tripping on a paving stone, but it turns out that Rick is the one who's in danger of serious injury.

Having accepted funding from the local council, Rick reluctantly agrees to teach a Stand-up Comedy Workshop in Belford Prison. But this turns out to be one of Rick's worst gigs: he is taken hostage, trapped in the prison library by a knife-wielding prisoner, Donald. Donald is a worrying mixture of charming and psychotic - and worse still for Rick, has a pathological hatred of liars. Can Rick talk his way out of trouble? Will the governors give in to Donald's demands? Or will this be the end of Rick's less-than-stellar career?

Blade

In the concluding episode, Rick has at last found the fame and success he so desperately craved. Thanks to his ordeal as a hostage, the 'Prison Siege Comic', as he is now known in the tabloids, is on an all-time high. He is inundated with offers - from appearing as a hostage expert on the national news, to featuring in a celebrity survival series.

When he is asked to host The Brave Britain Awards in front of a live television audience of millions, Rick thinks all his dreams have finally come true. But, as he prepares to go on stage, it seems that the dream is about to turn into a nightmare.

Lead Balloon is a British television series produced by Open Mike Productions for BBC Four. The series was created and is co-written by comedian Jack Dee and Pete Sinclair. It stars Dee as Rick Spleen, a cynical and misanthropic comedian whose life is plagued by petty annoyances, disappointments and embarrassments. Raquel Cassidy, Sean Power and Tony Gardner also star. The first series of six episodes was broadcast on BBC Four in 2006, with the first episode achieving the highest ratings for a comedy on the channel. Repeats of the series were run on BBC Two and BBC HD, bringing it to a larger audience. A second series of eight episodes aired on BBC Two in November 2007, and a third series began airing in November 2008. A fourth and final series commenced broadcast on 31 May 2011 on BBC Two and ended on 5 July.

Comparisons were made by critics to the successful American comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, and positive comments were made about Lead Balloon's characters, particularly Magda, the Eastern European housekeeper. The first series was released on DVD in November 2007. The show's theme tune is a cover version of "One Way Road", written by Noel Gallagher and performed by Paul Weller.

The Best Seasons of Lead Balloon

The Best Seasons of Lead Balloon

Season 3

Season 4

Season 2

Season 1