Alison Steadman

Love And Marriage is a new comedy-drama on ITV which, in that very ITV way, pinches from other shows. The characters - members of the extended Paradise family - sit on sofas and talk directly to the camera about themselves and their aspirations. You'll remember this from Modern Family. Very soon, there's an opportunity for some golden-oldies, grab-it-before-you-end-up-potted-heid romance. You'll remember this from Last Tango In Halifax. All of this is almost shameless even though Love And Marriage doesn't actually steal from Shameless. I wouldn't mind if it brought something new to the busy kitchen table of interwoven laughter-and-tears clan sagas, but I'm not sure it does.

It's a show of over-enthusiastic pub quizzes, congas starting in the conservatory and continuing right round the garden and christenings with the middle name "Beyoncé". Alison Steadman is the always-giving matriarch Pauline with a batty father, a husband who barely communicates, a son always borrowing money - and a free-spirit sister who's acquired almost as many husbands as her house has bedrooms (seven). Thus, when Pauline retires as a school ­lollipop lady, she ­decides: "Stuff the lot of you." She may not be back and ­neither might I.

New comedy-drama Love and Marriage starred Alison Steadman as newly retired lollipop lady Pauline. We knew that Pauline was put upon because she was laden down with carrier bags, which also worked as metaphor for her bustling, self-absorbed extended family (including Extras' Ashley Jensen).

Pauline's husband, "Silent Ken" (Duncan Preston), had a face like a wet Wednesday and the conversational skills of undercoat. When he refused to comfort Pauline after her father died, nobody would have blamed her for lunging at him with her lollipop. Instead, Pauline became one of those "silver splitters" beloved of the Daily Mail, leaving Ken to live with her free-spirited sister (Celia Imrie), and declaring: "I'm not going to be a daughter or a wife or a mother any more." There's an audience for the likes of Love and Marriage, but it verged on meandering and urgently needs to pep up. I was left with the feeling that I'd been watching a stellar cast making ham sandwiches for an hour.

"Secrets in a marriage are like dry rot in a house," opines newly retired lollipop lady Pauline Paradise (Alison Steadman) to an off-screen interviewer. Her husband Ken (Duncan Preston), slumped beside her on the sofa in a near-permanent state of catatonic disengagement, concurs.

As do the rest of the extended Paradise family, their homes visited in turn by this shamelessly contrived but extremely convenient narrative device, which throws into stark relief the shared veneer of domestic contentment with the cauldron of deceit, disappointment and dissatisfaction bubbling beneath.

There is - you guessed it - trouble in the Paradises, and ITV's new comedy drama Love and Marriage will be here over the next six weeks to chronicle it.

There were an awful lot of Paradises to introduce, with an awful lot of back stories to establish, so episode one was rather obliged to sacrifice subtlety on the altar of exposition.

When characters weren't sharing information with the camera they were frequently to be found telling each other things they already knew - "You were a top model in the 1970s" - for the benefit of viewers at home. During the first 20 minutes, the top-rate cast waded heroically through a mud slide of explanatory dialogue, with the threat of submersion beneath a wave of audience impatience never more than a line away.

Shortly after the first ad break, however, they hit dry land. The storylines kicked in, the dialogue came alive - "She keeps saying my name as if she's never heard it before and doesn't like the sound of it" - and proceedings began to gather a satisfying pace.

The Paradise clan, we learnt, are beset by a multitude of problems - financial, emotional, domestic, professional, romantic, historic - which they look to matriarch Pauline to either solve or shoulder.

Following the accidental death of her father, the much-put-upon Pauline reassesses her life and rejects all the roles imposed upon her. To everyone's amazement, including her own, she ups sticks, moves in with her racy younger sister and starts telephoning potential new suitors at two o'clock in the morning.

Despite its remorselessly jaunty soundtrack, Love and Marriage explored some sombre themes and was all the more interesting for it. Steadman's performance drives the drama, but she has excellent support from a stellar cast that also includes Ashley Jensen, Larry Lamb and Celia Imrie.

If not quite hooked, I shall stick with the series, if only to find out why the Paradise family's quiz team didn't get a point for correctly identifying The Constant Gardener as Rachel Weisz's Oscar-winning vehicle.

Love and Marriage, ITV's new six-part comedy drama, was about sacrifice. Alison Steadman played Pauline Paradise, a 60-year-old matriarch, who had spent her whole adult life caring for her large family and receiving not-very-much thanks in return.

When she left the house on her last day before retiring, her taciturn husband Ken (Duncan Preston) didn't even look up from his paper. When her father died, he went to bed and hoped she wouldn't want to talk about it. And Pauline and Ken were not the only ones with problems. Their offspring were all in trouble. Kevin, their eldest son, was in debt and newly redundant; Heather, their highly strung daughter, was racing against the biological clock to get pregnant; and Martin, their youngest son, was worn out by the demands of his huge family.

And that's just the "drama" half of this "comedy drama". To squeeze in the humour as well was asking a lot of writer Stewart Harcourt and, on the evidence of the first episode, perhaps a bridge too far. It's difficult to be funny when you're so busy establishing characters and plot (although including a joke about the Manson family, the subject of biting satire forty years ago, was pretty desperate).

So there are grounds for optimism. As we get to know the Paradise clan better, the jokes will hopefully improve. In the meantime, the drama should keep people tuning in.

Alison Steadman and Duncan Preston star as matriarch and patriarch of the Paradise family in this new six-parter about families and all the stuff that comes with them. But things aren't perfect in the Paradise's domestic setup - do you see what they did there? All the kids have gone off and got married and Mrs Paradise sees the yawning chasm between her and her husband. Will she grasp her autumn years in both hands and take them dancing or just carry on as usual? We've got six episodes to find out.

The peerless Alison Steadman walks the line between laughter and tears with aplomb, taking the lead as Pauline Paradise in this six-part comedy drama. Nearing the end of her road as a lollipop lady, Pauline is apprehensive about her looming retirement. But does anyone in her family care that her life is at a crossroads? Not a jot, it seems, with taciturn hubby Ken (Duncan Preston) being, well, taciturn, and her brood of offspring preoccupied with their own lives and rearing assorted infants. It's a Syndicate-style format, with the perspective shifting from one Paradise to another, week by week. The impressive supporting cast includes Celia Imrie, Larry Lamb, Ashley Jensen, Graeme Hawley and Zoe Telford.

Fans of Modern Family will recognise one of the conceits here: husbands and wives sitting on sofas, chatting amicably directly to camera. But Love and Marriage isn't Modern Family. In fact, judging by this first episode, I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe it's down to the uneven tone. It begins so breezily you think, maybe this is a comedy.

Or even a comedy drama as the interwoven lives of the Paradise family slosh across the screen amid much shouting and laughter. Forbearing matriarch Pauline (Alison Steadman) is retiring from her job as a school lollipop lady and she's expected to fade quietly away. Then, suddenly, Love and Marriage becomes something else altogether, and there's a dash of Last Tango in Halifax and a daub of tragedy. Still, it's intriguing enough to make you want to return.

Gentle family dramas? They're bloody everywhere at the moment. Second series of The Cafe and Starlings are imminent on Sky. Frankie ambles on over on BBC1. And then there's this new offering in which Alison Steadman's long-suffering matriarch Pauline Paradise (whose name makes her sound more like a drag queen) decides - on the occasion of her father's funeral, no less - that she's fed up of producing party spreads, lending money, providing endless, one-way emotional support and spending time with her silent husband. Instead, she's going to bugger off and live with her sister; her brood can stand on their own two feet for once.

Initial signs aren't good - jaunty piano music signposts everything and the increasingly worn-out narrative device of characters delivering documentary-style pieces-to-camera feels lazy. But Steadman is a trooper, even in a role she could probably play in her sleep and, by the end, it just about feels worth hanging on for another episode. It's an extremely close run thing, though...

Alison Steadman shines in this over-complicated show

I think my issues with Love and Marriage started almost instantly as writer Stewart Harcourt introduced the various members of the Paradise family by having the couples introduce themselves straight to camera.

Alison Steadman interview

Alison Steadman talks about her role in ITV comedy drama Love And Marriage.