If you’re as terminally online as I am, you’re probably aware of the “men written by women”′ trend; the idea being that men who listen and are compassionate more closely resemble media characters written by women than the usual hypermasculine archetype. Naturally, this being the world, the bar for being “written by a woman” is staggeringly low, but when you come across a show like Starstruck, you begin to feel what “written by a woman” is supposed to feel like. This rom-com, written by and starring Rose Matafeo, blossoms with originality, wit and heart; it’s the Kiwi stand-up’s first big break into the world of TV, but with a Perrier award in the bag already and a stand-up career that began aged 15, there’s no doubting her pedigree which manifests itself plainly in this show.

Matafeo plays our protagonist Jessie, a twenty-something living in London who, on an NYE night out, goes home with Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel), an A-list celebrity actor. We watch them Ross-and-Rachel for six episodes, before in the finale Jessie agrees to stay in London with Tom indefinitely. Series two (recently released) picks up in the aftermath of that decision, and over the course of the next six episodes, Jessie learns that being in a relationship is about more than loving someone, it’s about commitment, compromise and a responsibility to one another.

Starstruck takes an inversion of a common premise but allows a script we’d normally see on the big screen to breathe over the longer format. That additional time is reinvested into the characters’ relationships and this pays dividends. The dialogue between Tom and Jessie feels more real than anything I’ve seen on TV in a long time, swapping the awkward, Americanised romantic tension, for heartfelt conversations between two funny, if slightly socially inept, loveable characters.

“It’s hard not to want to scream about it from the rooftops”

It’s not just heart where this show excels, it more than lives up to the “com” bit of the brief as well. Starstruck is hilarious, but in a unique way, that sort of makes you sad how noticeable female-led shows can be. Emma Sidi is the star of a supporting cast that delivers heavily on comedic moments, helping keep the pace as energetic as the rest of Matafeo’s discography (I cannot recommend her stand-up special Horndog enough).

In series one, Patel never really wowed me, but he successfully plays the straight man to Matafeo’s Jessie. In series two, however, he really gets to show off his acting chops, and he more than rises to the occasion. A lot of the comedy stems from Jessie’s slightly surreal persona in the midst of a gritty, hyper-realistic, millennial in London lifestyle. The juxtaposition between this tall, frizzy-haired, Kiwi and her dead-end job in Hackney are well conveyed in the score, where light, nymph-like piano notes seem to accompany Jessie’s every blunder.

“High quality TV has not always been a certainty”

Look, it isn’t easy to make a socially awkward, middle-class, repressed Physics undergraduate say, “wow, that joke about periods was really properly funny”, and the fact that this happened two or three times effectively shows what I’m taking 600 words to tell you. Starstruck is a unique, funny show, and when you combine that with the heart that this show brings, it is tough not to want to scream from the rooftops about it.

BBC Three’s newest hit is written by a female immigrant, who travelled here to take advantage of our live comedy scene, and is now making risky, daring, high-class TV on a public service broadcaster. Over the last two years, all of those things have started to feel a little less like certainties to us, so we should savour shows like this, while we still can.