Anna Chancellor

The soft-centred babies-making-babies sitcom returns for a third series, with Laura and Jamie (Scarlett Alice Johnson and Sean Michael Verey) having trouble adjusting to life as a couple.

Well, Laura's having trouble and is trying to find a way of dumping her dimple-cheeked lover boy yet again.

"It's like watching someone torture a puppy. Stop messing him around," observes her waspish best friend, which is pretty much the size of it. Angus Deayton and Anna Chancellor co-star.

Radio Times review

BBC Three has always struck me as the most unlikely home for this soft-centred, blandly pleasing sitcom. It's not particularly sweary, its characters are inoffensive and it even flutters on the outskirts of twee, so it's hardly up there with Two Pints of Lager or Bad Education.

As we reach the third series young, accidental parents Jamie and Laura (Sean Michael Verey and Scarlett Alice Johnson), who conceived a baby after a misguided one-night stand, have a polite relationship for the sake of their little one.

But their parents are fractious and in chaos - Jamie's feckless dad has spent the family's money and they are evicted from their home, while Laura's high-flying mum (Anna Chancellor) is still in New York, communicating bad-temperedly via Skype with her estranged husband (Angus Deayton).

It is amazing what can be achieved in half an hour with just a great script, an excellent cast and a large wardrobe. Written by and starring Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, Inside No. 9 is a series of self-contained comedy dramas set in buildings or spaces numbered nine.

Episode one set a very high standard indeed, with an exquisitely crafted tale of jealousy, revenge, ambition, snobbery and murder centred around a country house game of sardines. With each new player discovering the hiding place, the wardrobe fills not only with bodies, but also hidden agendas, strained relationships, sinister backstories and rancid sweat (one eager participant, Smelly John, hadn't washed since he was a teenager).

No review of Shearsmith and Pemberton's work is complete without the adjectives dark and comic getting a mention, and I'm not about to break with tradition. But Inside No. 9 also offered poignancy, tension, intelligence, horror and several surprises. The lean, mean narrative didn't just twist and turn, it folded back upon itself to provide a totally unexpected, profoundly disturbing and deeply satisfying denouement. Even Smelly John's personal hygiene problem was revealed to be integral to the plot, rather than a mere comedy contrivance.

The writers also put in great performances as a bickering gay couple, supported by an impressively stellar cast that included Timothy West, Anna Chancellor, Marc Wootton and Anne Reid.

It has been a long march for The League Of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith since their original (very original) TV series in 1999. With each subsequent venture they have scrambled farther over the top. Inside No. 9, a series of one-off plays each taking place at a different address starting with 9, represents a retreat to firmer ground.

Last night's debut was much less fantastical than their last series Psychoville, free of prosthetics and cross-dressing. It dealt, as per, with incest and abuse, but in the manner that Alan Ayckbourn might. The Greek ruled that plays should take place over a single day in a single place. Sardines occurred over half an hour in a single wardrobe. It occupied a wall in an outsized family house, the scene of uptight daughter Rebecca's engagement party. Childhood momentum had propelled her and brother Carl (Pemberton), a man barely out of the closet and about to enter a wardrobe, into a game of sardines that no one wanted to play.

Katherine Parkinson's Rebecca was a superb study in congenital dissatisfaction, about to marry a man whose previous lover is not only still on his mind but in the wardrobe. The whole party ends up in there, including the dull, quiet one (beware the dull, quiet ones, they are usually the writers' surrogates). It is Carl, though, who outs the elephant in the wardrobe, a sexual assault on a child by his bullying father: "I was teaching the boy how to wash himself!" responds the father.

Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Anna Chancellor must have so enjoyed getting dialogue in which each sentence was minutely crafted for them. My favourite line may even have come from Timothy West as the patriarch complaining at a transgressing of sardine rules: "This isn't hide-and-go-seek". Was that posh for "hide and seek" or a unique verbal corruption?

Sardines was a disciplined comedy, but a little bit of discipline, as one of the League's perverts might say, never did anyone any harm. Save for the Tales of the Unexpected twist, I loved it.

Radio Times review

Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith return. If their last macabre comedy drama, Psychoville, was slightly weighed down by servicing a tricky overarching storyline, there's no such problem here since this is a series of one-offs, set in a variety of homes that all happen to be number nine on their street.

The opener is confined not just to a house, but to one room in a fusty old family mansion. And mostly, we're in the wardrobe: two grown-up siblings who used to live here (Pemberton and Katherine Parkinson) are celebrating her engagement with a party - and a game of sardines. As more guests squeeze in, everyone gets less and less comfortable, until the bickering turns to bile.

It's a vicious little one-act, one-room play, deftly staged and superbly acted by a cast that also includes Anne Reid, Anna Chancellor, Timothy West and Tim Key.

Inside No. 9 is magnificent. It is the latest series to emerge from the dark imaginations of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the pair who were also responsible for Psychoville & The League of Gentlemen (with Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson).

Their new series consists of six self-contained, bleakly comic dramas set in six very different No 9s, ranging from a suburban home to a country pile. Like all the best short stories or one-act plays, tonight's episode works with a deceptive and outrageous simplicity. A group of characters are playing a game of sardines. One after the other, they squeeze into a cupboard. Some are partners. Some are engaged. Some are work colleagues. Some have ugly histories in common, and one is a stranger to hygiene. Between them, they cover a wide variety of social backgrounds, sexual orientations and age groups. If a bomb dropped on the cupboard where they were hiding, a good portion of the acting talent in this country would be wiped out.

The high quality ensemble includes Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Katherine Parkinson, Anna Chancellor and Timothy West, all of whom squeeze in alongside Pemberton and Shearsmith. However, this isn't just an inspired set-up performed by a stellar cast, it builds to a macabre and horribly imagined climax.

That thin line between stupid and clever isn't always a funny one. The concluding part of Charlie Brooker's would-be non-stop laughfest gets becalmed between metatextual policier spoofing and jokes about bumming. The inventive sight gags that distinguished our first stint with Jack Cloth (John Hannah) and Anne Oldman (Suranne Jones) have been largely sacrificed in favour of exhausting single entendres, while the repetition that begins as part of the joke ends up being plain repetitive.

Which is a shame, as it's always fun watching serious actors (in this case, gnarled mobster Stephen Dillane and uppity politician Anna Chancellor) being very silly. The understandably threadbare plot, by the way, sees Cloth's cover blown and Goodgirl (Chancellor) locking horns with Boss (Julian Rhind-Tutt) over whose running the city of Town. Rather more miss than hit; perhaps Karen Gillan and Adrian Dunbar, lined up for the imminent third series, can revive a concept that's run out of steam rather quicker than we might have hoped.

Pramface returns for a second series, and with an added cast-member. Having birthed the result of her fling with Jamie, Laura gets to the business of being a mother, ducking the snide remarks of family members and the incompetence of the father of her child. It proves a juggling act as the christening approaches, with Jamie's pious extended family coming in from Ireland and a tense flashpoint smouldering away that, obviously, has to ignite in the church. It's as clunky as ever, but Anna Chancellor is a steadying influence, and Scarlett Alice Johnson plays the frazzled new mum with aplomb.

Another charming episode proves last week's opening part of this new comedy wasn't a one-off. Newly pregnant Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) is still grappling with the full consequences of her one-night stand with 16-year-old Jamie (Sean Michael Verey) when her parents (Angus Deayton and Anna Chancellor) find out - in less than ideal circumstances.

The attractiveness of the British teenager may be as hard to detect as the Higgs boson particle, but it doesn't stop TV producers from putting more and more of them before the cameras for our inspection. Following the success of Skins and The Inbetweeners comes Pramface, a comedy of virginity, sex and pregnancy (yes, in that order) among the GCSE-sitting classes, and the discomfiture of their parents.

Sweet-faced but lecherous Jamie (Sean Michael Verey) and his conceited babe-magnet friend Mike (Dylan Edwards) are 16, have just finished their exams and are anxious to crash a party thrown by cooler and more grown-up schoolkids. "There may be scenes of a sexual nature," confides Mike, who wears green shirts with Harry Hill collars, sprays Lynx in his underpants and has made a shag-along soundtrack on his iPhone that ends with the theme to Top Gear. Elsewhere, pretty, 18-year-old A-leveller Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) has been grounded for smoking dope. She has a turn of phrase that shocks her anxious parents, Anna Chancellor and Angus Deayton: "It's not as if you found me snorting coke or straddling my pimp"; "To you the world's just one big fucking naughty step isn't it?" Naturally she escapes the prison of home by falling out of the window and at the posh party she drunkenly kisses Jamie. Minutes later, they are dancing the blanket hornpipe on a leopardskin throw in someone's bedroom, while Jamie's girlfriend Beth attempts to crawl out the door.

Weeks later, along with her A-levels, Laura gets another result: she's pregnant. She has no recollection of her inamorata, only a phone number. When they arrange to meet in a café, she makes for the promising-looking chap sitting by himself, but gets it wrong: the father of her child is the geeky kid at the other table. Oh, no! He's 16, she's 18 - an unbridgeable gap - she has a croissant in the microwave and their young lives are blighted for ever. Or are they?

Chris Reddy dreamt up Pramface and wrote the script, directed by Daniel Zeff. It has nice touches: when Laura rings the number scrawled on a note, to say, "We slept together and now I'm pregnant", she dials the wrong number and her voice is beamed to the phone-speaker of a car driven by a startled bourgeois with his family. But it's all so derivative. Do we need any more jerking-off jokes, orgasm faces, drunk-girl pratfalls? There's a deal too much Americana here too: the plot's straight from Knocked Up; the party scenes of interchangeable babes owe a lot to Beverly Hills 90210; Laura's taut family supper echoes American Beauty. Lacking the rude conviction of The Inbetweeners, it comes over as The Hand-Me-Downers.