Caroline Aherne

This unexpectedly moving one-off comedy drama, co-written by The Royle Family's Caroline Aherne, stars an excellent Timothy Spall as Georgie Godwin, a Rochdale man so obese he hasn't left his house in 15 years. He lives on pizzas and mask-delivered oxygen, and needs his hardened calves to be massaged regularly by his carer, Janice (Frances Barber). Keeping him in sausage rolls is his sprightly "manager", Morris Morrissey (a splendid Tommy Ball), who charges tourists to gawp at Godwin's 50-stone frame. With Aherne's ribald northern humour (even the banner outside Godwin's neighbour's house, "Happy 30th Nana", is funny), the drama manages to be touching and fearlessly forthright as well as amusing.

In normal years, The Royle Family would be the sitcom special to be most keenly anticipated, but after last Christmas's aberration, "The New Sofa", judgement should be reserved on Caroline Aherne's latest reunion, "The Golden Egg Cup" (Christmas Day, 9pm BBC1). For unalloyed excitement, the 'Outnumbered Christmas Special' has me slathering at the chops. It's Boxing Day, and Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's recognisably modern metropolitan family, the Brockmans, has been burgled - and I don't mean harassed parents Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner getting every scene stolen from under their noses by the improvising child actors, Tyger-Drew Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez.

Another chance to catch the under-the-radar 2003 sitcom from Phil Mealey and long-term Caroline Aherne collaborator Craig Cash, which centred around the comings and goings of a Manchester pub. Naturalistically played, subtle and well worth sticking with.

Royle Family set for New Year return

Bosses at the BBC are in talks with Caroline Aherne to write more 'specials' of The Royle Family after 10 million viewers tuned in to watch the comedy on Christmas Day.

Early Doors is a step brother of The Royle Family, having the same father, Craig Cash, but not the same mother, Caroline Aherne. It is such a slow-burning comedy that you only start to smile during the next programme. Which happens to be Newsnight. This is a bonus as it sweetens the news and, indeed, Kirsty Wark whom, on any normal night, you would watch from behind the sofa.

The new sitcom Early Doors is a sort of kid of The Royle Family, but now being raised by the father alone. The series was being written by that show's co-creators, Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne, until, we may guess, she decided that a show set in a pub was not the perfect subject for her at the moment. She left and Cash co-opted a new dialogue buddy, Phil Mealey.

Cash has said that the plan had been for Aherne to play a landlady but that they had difficulty imagining the character. But Cash's admission raises the project's main problem, which is that pubs are as familiar a part of television as televisions are of pubs.

In fact, one of the reasons that The Royle Family was so daring was that experience of the medium led you to expect that they must eventually get off their arses and go to the pub, but they never did. Early Doors aims for the same claustrophobia by trapping the characters on one set, but people stuck on alehouse benches don't have the same visual shock as a whole family beached on a settee.

Shot in dirty light without a laughter-track, the show begins with landlord Ken (John Henshaw) in his empty empire, decanting cheap brandy into a posher bottle and diverting the charity box into the till.

The regulars arrive and exchange banalities ("temporary traffic lights over at Samuel Street"), inanities ("Joe's having a shit"), incomprehensible in-jokes and semi-derelict slang ("Keep your hand on your halfpenny"). Future plot possibilities are laid down: Ken's daughter isn't actually his and there's also doubt about the father of her own child. Many scenes take place in the gents, the soundtrack featuring the meticulous drip of piss and plop of shit.

In the modern style - The Office, Phoenix Nights - it's the kind of comedy that should come with a bottle of paracetamol or a length of rubber tubing for the car. The theme could be described as the loneliness of company. It's potentially brilliant, but the pisser is that viewers have spent so much time in pubs. Though in Aherne's absence they've sensibly dispensed with a landlady, Ken keeps tripping over Al Murray's pub landlord.

Aherne walks out of Early Doors

Caroline Aherne has quit the BBC sitcom she was developing with her Royle Family writing partner, Craig Cash.