Alan Bennett (I)

Fix yourself a plate of fish fingers and a glass of wine: the Stevensons are back. Not that anyone will notice much: when this quietly brilliant comic-drama about the minutiae of a marriage ran in 2010 it caused barely a ripple, but those of us who loved it, loved it.

If you're coming to it fresh, don't expect Terry and June. The inspirations are nearer Mike Leigh or Alan Bennett: closely-observed human foibles with a vein of tragedy just below the surface. Val (Dawn French) is a cookery teacher. Roger (Alfred Molina) was a horticulturalist until he lost his job. Buried in their past - but ever present - is the memory of a child who died as a baby.

Tonight they're just back from a wedding, and we follow the usual niggles and shared jokes, their views on old songs, the correct timing of meals, Sunday papers, and the best way to unpack. Roger is haunted by the prospect of his employment tribunal while Val might be up for the deputy headship. It's that kind of show.

A new sitcom from director and executive producer Craig Cash (The Royle Family) that is co-written by Ralf Little (The Royle Family and Two Pints...) and Michelle Terry (Reunited). It's a classic British sitcom set-up - take an institution (in this case a seaside cafe) and use it as a hub for characters to interact and to tease out class, inter-generational and social observations. The comedy and characters are gentle, if at times familiar, but there's a nice pace to it, as though pitched somewhere between Gavin And Stacey and Alan Bennett.

A terrific performance by Paula Wilcox is central to this amusing drama by Daniel Thurman that explores the dangers of having too much time on your hands. She plays Yvonne, whose world is thrown upside down when, aged 64, she loses her job. Until this cataclysmic moment Yvonne and her husband Neil (Philip Jackson) have drifted along in contented domesticity while he indulged his passion for birdwatching. But suddenly, Yvonne starts to see Neil's hobby as something more sinister; a reason to escape, a desperate cry for freedom - despite the protestations of her pragmatic friend Wendy (the peerless Anne Reid). There are some beautifully observed moments and tremendously witty dialogue that - very much in the vein of Alan Bennett - finds rich humour in the seemingly mundane.

James Corden grows up after learning the perils of fame

First there were Alan Bennett's play and the hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey. Then the backlash. Now James Corden is back.

The welcome new series of Andrew McGibbon's The Cornwell Estate had its star, in episode two, playing a Newcastle comic banned by matrimonial injunction from entering the city centre. Instead, he devised a high altitude messaging system by attaching one of his publicity posters to a homing pigeon to semaphore reparation to the teenage daughter he had never met.

The series' co-creator Phil Cornwell plays a different character in each episode, the style of which is pitched midway between Alan Bennett and Alan Partridge. Coincidentally, the breathtakingly talented Cornwell once played a DJ in I'm Alan Partridge. This is comedy drama which holds its nerve, not always going for the obvious joke, bundling nerdiness up with edginess. The opener had Cornwell as a teacher muddling his way blindly through a minefield of potential racism as he tries to coax ethnicity from pupils whose origins may have been far-flung but who were firmly rooted in Potter's Bar.

Which leaves us with the gentle sitcom Roger & Val Have Just Got In to keep us away from the barbequeue. And you know, it may just succeed. The cruel would suggest that this is a sort of middlebrow update of Terry & June: middle class couple come home from work & talk about the petty vicissitudes of life; the trivial, the mildly irritating.

The first episode involved them looking for a guarantee for a vacuum cleaner in a drawer filled with household detritus. That was it: nothing more. And it worked. The script was fine and restrained and even on occasion approached the level of Alan Bennett. But the real pleasure was in the performances of Dawn French and Alfred Molina, which were lovely, quite exquisite. Mind you, I write as someone who adored the Vicar of Dibley and thinks Dawn French can do no wrong.

Ladies Of Letters is the kind of small-scale treat that is exactly what the multitude of tiny channels should be doing but so rarely do. Essentially it's splendid actors Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid bitching and bickering, then rubbing along, in a series of loosely linked comic monologues. It owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Bennett's Talking Heads and there's no higher praise than that.

The running joke is that the Ladies in question, Vera and Irene, are friends who like to pretend they are enemies; they can't be doing with each other but they can't do without. It's a gentle essay in the nature of loneliness, cloaked in a thorny cardy of spiky insults. Best joke? Vera's gay farmer son Howard calling his sheep Lady Baa-Baa.

Just how many characters do Whitehouse, Higson and co have up their sleeves? Last week saw this BBC2 comedy really hit its groove, with a theme of what makes Britain "great" bringing shape to largely improvised comedy. Whitehouse channelled Jon Gaunt for his rent-a-gob DJ and Higson introduced his testy history professor, both playing brilliant off Rhys Thomas' straight man. But the underrated Felix Dexter and Simon Day are this show's unsung heroes - the latter's Alan Bennettpesque poet's verse on "ethnic" cuisine was both laugh-out-loud funny and oddly poignant.

In Mouth to Mouth an Essex-girl called Meeshell recounted dumping her best friend and her boyfriend to try to win a version of The X Factor. The level of humour of this illustrated monologue can be judged from the phonetic spelling of her name, by lines such as "I'm not age-a-list, I just don't want to smell piss when I sing" and by the writer Karl Minns' belief that spastic colons and testicular cancer are of themselves funny. His one-liners kept on coming, unfortunately. No sooner was her unbelievable whine over than we heard the story again from Meeshell's cynical ex-boyfriend Tyler in the second part of the double bill. Anna Nightingale as Meeshell and Alex Price as Tyler produced the sorts of trying-too-hard performances normally inflicted only on audition reels. Sadly, it will be a while before Minns is hailed as the next Alan Bennett.

We first met wannabe pop star Meeshell last year in a pilot that neatly mixed gags with pathos, as she gazed into the camera and bared her soul. Now Meeshell and a ragbag of mates return for a series, with each taking centre-stage for one episode. In tonight's double bill we hear more about Meeshell's girl band Cat's Eyes - "we're going to be more bigger than Girls Aloud" - bikini-waxing tips and secret heartaches, before moving on to her directionless, dope-smoking boyfriend Tyler. Witty and touching by turns, it's Alan Bennett's Talking Heads for the noughties.