Cherie Lunghi

You've heard of the Grey Pound. Pat And Cabbage is what you might call a symptom of the Grey Remote: TV geared to older people, ie the ones who actually watch TV on a television set, not a handheld device. Inevitably, this seems amiable stuff, the vaguely interesting premise a cut above the likes of My Family. Pat (Barbara Flynn) and Cabbage (Cherie Lunghi) are cast as sixtysomething divorcees - in a time when 60 is considered youngish. What will their dependents make of their new alliance, and their new start?

Pat and Cabbage are 60-something friends. Pat (Barbara Flynn) is a bit staid, Cabbage (Cherie Lunghi) is devil-may-care. Pat's daughter thinks Cabbage is a bad influence on her mum. But Pat gets caught up in her friend's schemes. A painfully jaunty soundtrack accompanies every single telegraphed gag - Pat's daughter brings a hamster into the house, Pat is afraid of hamsters, you know what's going to happen next.

Pat and Cabbage is written by actresses Amy Shindler (Brenda Tucker in The Archers) and Beth Chalmers and is produced by the people who gave us Last Tango in Halifax. But Pat and Cabbage is no Last Tango in Halifax.

Pat and Cabbage are the type of bubbly suburban best friends you only see in sitcoms: they meet for morning jogs, midday pilates and afternoon coffee over the kitchen counter. They moan about their grown-up kids interfering in their lives and gossip about who they fancy and how big their bums are.

If you're of the same age or going through a similar experience - that is: newly retired, newly single and free to flirt with men you meet while dropping your grandchild off at nursery - you might find the pair's antics at least mildly diverting. Otherwise, it's hard to see the comedy in Pat (Barbara Flynn) and the inexplicably named Cabbage (Cherie Lunghi) making off with a neighbour's wheelie bin (apparently it was Pat's) or parking up outside the house of a love interest like a couple of schoolgirls-cum-stalkers.

By the end of the first episode of this new ITV sitcom, you might share the sentiment of Pat's daughter, who pointedly asks: 'Why can't you just go on a coach trip to see Phantom of the Opera like every other mother?'.

Last year, Starlings got that difficult formula for cosy comedy drama exactly right: visits to the Starlings brood in Matlock were warm, funny and welcoming without quite descending into vomitous tweeness. So it continues with the series-two opener, where a mishap for young Charlie (Finn Atkins) and a new suitor for matriarch Jan (the gently authoritative Lesley Sharp) bring threats we know very well the family will eventually overcome. This year, Cherie Lunghi joins the superb cast.

Jane Asher, Cherie Lunghi and, this week, Tessa Wyatt - the woman who once broke Tony Blackburn's heart. Well, we can see what Roy and Tom's type is when it comes to women: middle-class, actressy types with lovely vowels and no interest in either Roy or Tom.

Having finally accepted that they don't stand a chance with their neighbour Sally, this week the pair decide to break their addiction to her by meeting other women.

As they both end up on the same date with the same woman, the comedy is as corny and predictable as ever, but it's carried along by Roger Lloyd Pack and Clive Swift's considerable boyish charm.

What at first glance appeared to be an unpromising hybrid of Grumpy Old Men and One Foot in the Grave has turned out to be rather an endearing sitcom, which is back for a second series starting tonight. The two central characters, played by veterans Roger Lloyd Pack (instantly recognisable as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, despite the shaggy grey hair and stubble) and Clive Swift (aka Mr Hyacinth Bucket) are not simply crotchety, they're also randy, caustic, competitive and mean - the opening scene finds them eating stale rice cakes with tomato purée for breakfast because they're in deadlock about whose turn it is to do the "big shop". Writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong previously created the Channel 4 odd-couple comedy Peep Show, so they're skilled at creating awkward scenarios, but it is the casual banter between Tom (Lloyd Pack), a sarcastic one-time rock'n'roller, and Roy (Swift), a peevish wannabe sophisticate, that makes the show. The best moment in this opening episode comes when the two of them attempt to impress a sexy new librarian (Cherie Lunghi) with their choice of reading material. Tom opts for Madame Bovary, a DIY manual and a book about improving sexual technique. "She's going to think I'm a sensitive, practical guy who's good in bed," he boasts. "Or possibly a suicidal self-abuser whose shelves are falling down," Roy retorts. OK, so it's not Seinfeld, but it's worth a look.

Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong are a writing team garlanded with awards for their work on edgy comedies like The Thick of It and Peep Show. They also co-wrote the film Four Lions, Chris Morris's black comedy about suicide bombers. It might seem a far cry from Four Lions to two old codgers, but Bain and Armstrong's likeable sitcom about an ageing pair of ill-matched blokes has the same vein of recognisable absurdity running through it as all their best stuff. As we rejoin Roy (Clive Swift) and Tom (Roger Lloyd Pack), in an episode written by Simon Blackwell, they are eating olives and rice cakes for breakfast while arguing about whose turn it is to do the shopping. The fact that male hopelessness in everything from shopping to romance remains as much a problem in age as in youth is a joke the series plays off well. The pair are still clumsily besotted with their neighbour Sally (Jane Asher) and concerned that she has a new boyfriend ("She keeps going out with men who aren't even remotely us," moans Tom). But now there's a new distraction - a stylish librarian, Barbara, played by Cherie Lunghi.

Moved to a new home on Friday nights, where it's much-needed, the second series of The Old Guys feels as comfortable as a pair of slippers.

Ironically, the first series suffered from the fact that it was created by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. Their fans would have been expecting Peep Show for pensioners - and it certainly wasn't that.

It was more like Men Behaving Badly meets One Foot In The Grave. Its sense of humour might be cutting but it could never be described as cutting-edge, and it wasn't trying to be. It was safe, cosy and non-threatening - aimed firmly at the kind of viewers who loved Clive Swift as Hyacinth's husband in Keeping Up Appearances.

Series two finds Swift and Roger Lloyd Pack's flat-sharing Old Couple still lusting after their sexy but oblivious neighbour Sally (Jane Asher) and dismayed that she's found "another bloody boyfriend who isn't us". But there's a new woman on the scene - a librarian, played (improbable as it sounds) by Cherie Lunghi. You can already start to see Jane Asher's glamorous hackles rise and having a bit of competition (even for two men she's not remotely interested in) should put the cat among the pigeons.

This week Tom and Roy enter a pub quiz to prove that age hasn't shrunk their brain cells. And Tom's quest continues to underline how even though they might both be old, he's not as old as Roy. "You did National Service in Caterham," he points out. "I did acid in Wardour Street."