Ashley Jensen

Radio Times review

Agatha Raisin, a brittle London PR with a sharp bob and spiked heels, gives up her fast-paced life for the peace of a honey-coloured thatched cottage nestling in the Cotswolds. But her attempts to fit into the life of the village of Carsely backfire horribly when the local roué is poisoned by a quiche that Agatha submitted to the village show.

Agatha is the charmless amateur-sleuth heroine of a string of bluntly jolly books by MC Beaton. OK, this isn't The Wire, but it will, ahem, kill a couple of hours on a night when you'll possibly welcome something that makes no demands on you whatsoever. Ashley Jensen makes a chic, lively Agatha and the Cotswold scenery is, of course, chocolate-box perfect.

Ashley Jensen on Agatha Raisin

"I've played a lot of best friends so it's nice to be at the helm," The Extras and Ugly Betty star explains as she returns to our screens in Sky1's Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death.

Ashley Jensen, Katy Wix and Hermione Norris star in this comic adventure about a friendless, hard-nosed PR maven who moves to the countryside only to find the peaceful village she has chosen is riven with scandal, murder and rigged baking competitions. The script is very thin gruel but some splendid actors go a long way to saving it. Basically, a much camper Midsomer Murders with a no-brainer whodunnit at its centre and no real character development.

Actress Ashley Jensen channels her inner clown

She may have left Hollywood behind, but the vivacious Scots actor retains a love-hate relationship with glamour.

Ricky Gervais reveals another Extras prophecy

In the wake of Samuel L. Jackson being mistaken for Laurence Fishburne in a cringe-makingly awkward US TV interview, the funnyman took to Twitter to point out that Ashley Jensen's character had done the exact same thing in a 2005 episode of the show.

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.

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.

Gavin & Stacey star Alison Steadman washes herself of eager-to-please Essex mum Pam to play a matriarch who's finally had enough of her family in Love and Marriage, ITV's latest star-packed drama.

When her husband fails to show support throughout her retirement and the death of her father, frustrated doormat Pauline Paradise (Steadman) breaks it to her adult kids - who include Ashley Jensen and Coronation Street star Graeme Hawley - that she's packing her bags and starting a new life. Also featuring Celia Imrie and Larry Lamb, Love and Marriage is at once funny and poignant, disheartening and upflifting. We'd say it's definitely worth a peek, even before the mini-Gavin & Stacey reunion.