Alexandra Roach

This is the strangest episode so far, as Stuart (Derek Jacobi) and Freddie (Ian McKellen) invite young Ash (Iwan Rheon) and his new girlfriend Chloe (Alexandra Roach) to dinner and then behave abominably towards her.

Trouble is, Chloe is lovey-dovey, airy-fairy, vegan and teetotal - in short, incredibly annoying - but before long the wicked pair have brought out her own vicious streak. I don't want to oversell the comedy, because a lot of it is lame, but the tone veers towards Joe Orton.

This is also the show to turn to if you've longed to see Frances de la Tour (Violet) handcuffed to a bed in Argentina dressed in PVC bondage gear. Any takers?

Doomed romance, bad luck and sexual confusion are hallmarks of the work of both Daphne Du Maurier and Julia Davis, so this sordid marriage of the two feels entirely natural. As a homage to Rebecca and the like, Hunderby is sublime: the turns of phrase are deft, the performances both arch and loaded with menace, and the wider production impeccably detailed. Importantly, however, room is also made for a cock-n-balls gag. Davis herself is Mrs Danvers surrogate Dorothy, pining after her late mistress (whose 'broken mound was as smooth as ham') and scheming against her new one, Helene (Alexandra Roach, doe-eyed and gauche), the shipwreck survivor courted by uptight pastor Edmund (Alex McQueen). Claustrophobic and grimly hilarious in the manner of Davis's best work, this is a triumphant opener for an award-winning series. If you missed it first time round, don't make the same mistake again.

Of all the mysteries in Julia Davis's latest series, Hunderby, perhaps none can trump that surrounding its revered creator.

How, interviewers have repeatedly wondered, can the reserved, self-deprecating woman in front of them be the same one responsible for some of the most disturbing TV comedy of the last decade? Chiefly Nighty Night, the sadistic sick-com which saw a deranged suburbanite breaking up marriages, poisoning priests, and inseminating herself with semen-spattered pie and mash. And then Lizzie and Sarah, a 2010 pilot about two abused wives whose wet-weekend-in-Dungeness levels of bleakness convinced the BBC to schedule it in the treasured time-slot prefacing late-night Ceefax.

Well, the plot only thickens with, Hunderby, which is less overtly shocking than those previous works but just as bizarre: a Gothic burlesque both finely mounted and fetidly imagined. Set in "the year of the Lord 1831", as the sonorous narration has it, it tells the story of a shipwrecked, amnesiac ingénue (Alexandra Roach) who washes up in an English coastal village and falls into marriage with its widowed pastor, Edmund. But her real misfortune is to have been cast into a particularly demented riff on Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, complete with devious housekeeper Dorothy, played by Davis herself, gruesome meal options, and endless servings of verbal and physical humiliation. "I take much comfort from your simplicity ... both of looks and character," Roach's hubby-to-be tells her early on, getting things off to a deliciously inauspicious start.

The script, needless to say, is one, long zinger, parodying high-falutin' costume-drama diction with an exquisite mixture of savagery and scatology. I loved Edmund's excruciating comparison of his first and second wives' pudenda: "Arabelle was smooth as ham - nature did not busy her broken mound with such a black and forceful brush". And Dorothy's sombre update on her master's mother's medical condition: "Her bowel has still not spoken, Sir ... though I fancy I caught a whisper." I could go on - and certainly will outside this column, so watch out friends, colleagues and quote-haters! - with countless other lines, whose surreal artistry you wanted to roll over your tongue and savour. Meanwhile Nighty Night fans will know what I mean when I say that the phrase "bubbly milk" could well become the new "Hiya Kath!"

But will the series have the impact of that cult favourite? Probably not - for all its perverse imagination, the tone is more muted, the humour less obvious and the literary conceit possibly more limiting. Though what chance it has rests with Davis's fabulously callous Dorothy; with her Medusa-like stare and simmering sexual pathology, she makes Mrs Danvers look like Mrs Doubtfire.

Doomed romance, bad luck and sexual confusion are hallmarks of the work of both Daphne Du Maurier and Julia Davis, so this sordid eight-part marriage of the two feels entirely natural. As a homage to Rebecca and the like, Hunderby is sublime: the turns of phrase are deft, the performances arch and loaded with menace, and the wider production superbly detailed. And, importantly, room is also made for a cock-n-balls gag. Davis herself is Mrs Danvers surrogate Dorothy, pining after her late mistress (whose 'broken mound was as smooth as ham') and plotting against her new one, Helene (doe-eyed Alexandra Roach), the shipwreck survivor courted by uptight pastor Edmund (Alex McQueen). Claustrophobic and grimly hilarious in the manner of Davis's best work, it's a triumphant opening double bill.

In her first series since the terrific Nighty Night, writer and comic actress Julia Davis brings her dark humour to a homage to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. With Davis's signature mix of double entendre, wince-making comedy and absurdity, this eight-part series, set in the 19th century, begins with a shipwreck. Survivor Helene (Alexandra Roach) is washed up on an English shore and rescued by the local pastor, who promptly asks her to marry him. This riles jealous housekeeper Dorothy (Davis).