Grace has some new confidence. But it’s increasingly hard for us to have confidence in Switch.

On the eve of the Camden coven’s 5 year Witchiversary, Grace is mugged by a youth with all the physical imposition of a Curlywurly. Shaken, she has a ‘confidence’ spell cast on her. It means that Phoebe Fox, who we’ve said again and again is the best thing about Switch, gets some room to act and become something other than the wet blanket she normally plays so delightfully well.

But it also means that with her newfound ‘va-va-broom’ Grace pounces on her crush, Carling Academy cut-out Gerry. In likely the oddest line of script heard on TV in 2012, Gerry proclaims ‘I love this [guitar] more than I love my penis’. Good job he didn’t have to face an either/or situation, as he needed his penis for all the sex he later had with Grace.

You might think that Gerry’s girlfriend Jude might be annoyed at her boyfriend shagging her mate, but in an infuriating piece of plotting that goes against her character, Jude lets it all slide because Grace is under a spell, and by the end of the episode everything is worked out in an unconvincing subtext of hugs and Freudian guitars.

Then again, perhaps Jude went easy on Grace because her mind was occupied elsewhere; too busy learning life lessons over enchanted t-shirts with Hannah. Yes, enchanted t-shirts. Honestly, increasingly Switch feels like a show we hallucinate every Monday night, as some sort of sugar-coated fugue state to handle the stress of a new working week.

Elsewhere Stella turns up to work to find that one of the bitchy Witches of Kensington, India (Sophie Colquhoun), has totes cast a spell on her office and now works/pouts there, in an ad agency that’s like SterlingCooperDraperPrice run by fourteen year olds. Forced to duel with India for the big mustard account, Stella brings out a pitch that, while not plagiarising Don Draper’s famous ‘Kodak Carousel’ speech from Season 1 of Mad Men, certainly bats its eyelashes in its direction. Frankly its’ a surprise no one said ‘We’re as keen as fucking mustard to get this account!’, because Switch loves to drop in the occasional swear word, like a teenager trying to shock it’s parents into spilling their Horlicks all over their corduroy sofas.

This is the problem with Switch, and it only becomes more glaring as the show progresses: it’s trapped in a state of arrested development, with the kind of family-friendly plots you could easily see in a teen drama, but infused with incongruent swearing and sexxxy talk. Like Capri-Sun mixed with Jaegermeister. One minute there’s a plot that wouldn’t seem out of place in a kid’s TV show, the next there’s knob jokes and talk of graphic sex acts.

The fact is Switch would be a much stronger show if it knew whether it wanted to be a grown up comedy or something for the after-school crowd. As it is, it feels like it’s trying to have it’s sheep’s head stew and eat it.

Aired at 10pm on Monday 5 November 2012 on ITV2.

> Order Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

What did you think of the episode? Let us know below…