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.

First in an anthology squeezed from the brains of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, with each darkly diverse tale unfolding within a different residence numbered nine. In this opener, which features Katherine Parkinson, Anne Reid and Timothy West, a country manor hosts an uncomfortable game of sardines between a family long since grown apart. A slow burner compared with the episodes that follow, but a decent introduction to a series stylistically similar to criminally disregarded Dawn French vehicle Murder Most Horrid.

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.

Though Alan and Celia are the twin heartbeats of Last Tango, in many ways this series has been about the flourishing of another relationship, the one between their daughters Caroline and Gillian.

Last week's episode was pivotal for the women when, in vino veritas, spiky, defensive Gillian (Nicola Walker) revealed a very dark episode from her past to an unwitting Caroline (Sarah Lancashire). Tonight, in the last instalment of the series, the pair emerge from a foggy alcoholic night to take stock.

But don't run away with the idea that it's all grim. There is a wedding to organise as Alan and Celia (Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi) renew their vows on a snowy Christmas Eve. It's a lovely occasion and writer Sally Wainwright, with her gift for putting her finger exactly on a drama's emotional pulse, brings us an occasion to cherish.

Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid star in the kind of British drama at which the BBC excels and, as the impressive viewing figures show, audiences still appreciate. The plot has modern flourishes (widower is reunited with childhood sweetheart via Facebook; lesbians) but this is an old-school, multi-generational observational family drama with comic subplot and it's all the better for it. Everything is pointing to a series-crowning wedding although, with an hour to fill and several other relationships hovering on the edge, we will have to work for our happy ending.

Awkwardness and confusion abound as Caroline (Sarah Lancashire) and Kate's romantic country weekend doesn't pan out quite as intended, John's designs on Gillian turn into a busy night down on the farm and Alan and Celia fret over skeletons in the closet. The plot of this engaging saga doesn't so much advance as entertainingly whirl round in circles - with a spot of teen bondage threatening to send Celia (Anne Reid) over the edge.

Too many people give too much away in Sally Wainwright's masterly drama, as Last Tango in Halifax takes some very dark turns. Emotional scabs that have never healed are ripped away by unwitting hands and the families at the heart of the drama pulse with the pain of open wounds. Celia (Anne Reid) inadvertently, though very thoughtlessly (and typically, as Reid told RT recently, because Celia is not a very nice woman), throws light on a bleak corner in the grim farm on the hill that illuminates a past sadness.

Soon relationships start to sunder under the pressure of exposed secrets and long-buried lies. Even that absolutely gorgeous house in Harrogate (oh, that kitchen! Those gardens!) is quietly starting to foment when it appears that lovers Caroline and Kate (Sarah Lancashire and Nina Sosanya) might want very different things, and a moment of tenderness sparks a crisis.

Poor Alan and Celia. Getting married secretly without telling their families is meant to be "just a bit of fun," say the hapless, happy couple. But their rash romanticism falls on stony ground as chippy, glum Gillian sees it as a betrayal. Oh, Gillian. It's tempting to yell at her, "Why don't you just cheer up, love?" but she has much to be anguished about. She thinks her lovely dad's common sense-filled head has been corrupted by his new association with sinfully bourgeois Harrogate, and her son delivers an emotional torpedo that threatens to blow up that gloomy family farmhouse on the moors.

It's another carefully calibrated episode of Sally Wainwright's smashing drama, as her characters push the frontiers of their lives into new and uncharted territories. For Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid), Gillian and Caroline (Nicola Walker and Sarah Lancashire) so much is about to change....

It's been a thinnish week for drama but Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright's almost sugar-free romance about two pensioners - former lovestruck teenagers reunited by Facebook after 60 years - was back for a second series having won the nation's affection and a Bafta last time out.

We found the pair almost as we left them, with the excellent Derek Jacobi as Alan, recovering from a heart attack brought on by their hasty quarrel about the desirability of lesbianism in Harrogate and perhaps one too many respiratory struggles with glottal northernisms (the downfall of many a thespian). Much has been made of this septuagenarian double act, and Jacobi and Anne Reid, a natural as Celia, shone even when they were just gazing over t'moors and talking about dead people.

It would be a gentler story, though, without the complications whipped up by their clashing daughters - Gillian (Nicola Walker), a widowed single mum and grubby farmer with an impulsive sex drive, and freshly outed Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), snooty head teacher of a school that sings Jerusalem every morning - each conscious, amid declarations of love and alarm bells at the realisation that old people have minds of their own, of festering parental disapproval that recent events could only aggravate.

With Caroline's dalliance with a junior female colleague out in the open, it was Gillian's turn to stir the pot with revelations of a drunken shag with Caroline's multi-philandering husband John (a wonderfully furtive Tony Gardner). I couldn't say whether this was more transgressive than Gillian's earlier eye-opener - seeing her carrying on (Yorkshire for sexual intercourse) with a lad young enough to be her son from the local filling station - but it had Derek Jacobi shaking his head. "You pillock," he said, a word that wasn't quite equal to his disappointment (he was thinking of the shame she had brought upon the house as a pregnant 15-year-old), but served to draw a line under the affair before he had another heart attack. In the end we left the lovebirds understandably sloping off to the register office for a deserved quiet wedding. But will they get it? Tune in Tuesday.