Anne Reid

Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman interview

As Ladies of Letters returns on ITV3, Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman explain how TV fails older viewers.

Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman's gloriously comic creations Vera and Irene return, exchanging missives and misunderstandings that produce some glorious comedy. Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales return to the roles - ITV3's versions in the form of Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman were fun, but pale shadows of the original.

The battling ladies have made a triumphant transfer from radio to TV thanks to Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid. It may be that life is going pear-shaped, but indomitable is the word for these two. This final outing isn't the strongest but it does reach a stylish and apt conclusion.

We don't tend to pick up programmes mid-run, but we feel sorry for Ladies Of Letters. Stuck out in the Arctic of ITV3, adapted from Radio 4, the signs are not good. Not good at all. But in spite of that, it's a lovely show. Mainly down to old pros Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman, who act the socks off the material, stringing every comic line out to just the right extent. Tonight contains the usual blend of accusations, animosity and acrimony. They're both in prison, Irene scrawling on toilet roll and Vera dictating to cellmate Beefy. At least until Irene signs off: 'I believe Vera espouses racialist views'. You might as well watch it now. It'll never get another series.

The pensioner pen-pals are still at tactful loggerheads, with the incarcerated Vera (Anne Reid) now being seen by a psychiatrist: "There's nothing wrong with me that 15 years of analysis won't put right." Good, healthy vulgarity vies with parochial whimsy, but all the best gags are visual.

Over on MasterChef, one of their recurrent themes is how you shouldn't chuck too many different flavours on the plate. So in TV terms, you could say that Ladies Of Letters is a masterclass in how to deliver the maximum amount of enjoyment from the simplest ingredients.

Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid are consistently brilliant as waspish widows Vera and Irene, and not a single word or gesture goes to waste.

Tonight when Vera discovers that her daughter Karen is pregnant, her reaction is sublime: "It's a fine line between joyful effervescence and murderous rage," she trills happily to her pen-pal.

The subject matter - like Vera's son who is obviously gay to everyone but his mother - might be slightly predictable, but the two leads can wring more comedy out of a single furious glance than many sitcoms manage in an entire episode. First class.

Joan Of Arc really loves the cows she looks after for a living, so when those b*****d English put them to death by fire she's on the warpath. And she's going to save the whole of France as well. Dawn French plays the Maid of Orleans with a Jam and Jerusalem West Country accent and there are constant references to her large girth. She's in her comfort zone, but so are we.

Written by Patrick Barlow and co-starring Anne Reid, Maggie Steed and Jim Broadbent, this play's comedy credentials are impeccable. But when events turn more serious, the sound effects conflict, trial and fire are full-on and genuinely moving. As Joan trips towards her famous fate, she loves and loses not just cows.

Ladies of Letters, the second part of whose 10-part adaptation from the radio show of the same name was shown last night, starred Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman as the letter-writing widows who keep their spirits up with sherry, shared recipes and long-distance one-upmanship. As with the radio version, the material is slightly thin, but you could watch (or in Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge's case, listen to) the actors involved all day. Clever, that.

Talking Heads meets Keeping Up Appearances in this engagingly spry offering about elderly widows who write to each other after meeting at a wedding. Maurine Lipman and Anne Reid play the tipple-fancying correspondents, Irene and Vera, whose exchanges of unusual recipes and family tittle-tattle becomes increasingly tart as misunderstandings creep in.

Oddities of style betray the programme's radio origins, but the quality of the writing wins the day, as do the actresses' mischievous glances and catty inflections.

Ladies Of Letters is ITV3's first comedy drama commission, but sadly it's also one of the final projects of the much-missed Geoffrey Perkins, who was executive producer.

Based on a book and successful radio series, Ladies Of Letters consists of an exchange of letters between two elderly widows, the joke (such as it is) depending on what is never quite stated in their peerlessly vacuous correspondence. Unfortunately, while doing an epistolary narrative such as this on radio is like falling off a log, doing it on television - with Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid taking the part of Irene and Vera - is an absolute nightmare.

For one thing, you have to decide what your correspondents are going to do while they're 'reading' their letters. Do they look at a writing pad or at the camera, and if it's the latter, then what part are we supposed to be playing in the thing? What on radio is a dialogue by other means becomes a pair of monologues flying in clumsy formation. What's more, nervous that comedy won't emerge from between the lines naturally, the producers have contrived a kind of forceps delivery. The line "I tried your taramasalata dip on the vicar's wife and she said she'd never tasted anything like it" provokes a monochrome flashback of a woman throwing up into her handkerchief. Or comedy sound effects are added to the memory of a mishap with a garage door. Or the performers are encouraged to overact wildly in an attempt to shock the thing into life. "Gerald always had a sweet tooth," wrote Vera of her late husband, and then, quite inexplicably, flung a pat of cake mix at his photograph. They tried everything, but it was dead on arrival.