Claire Skinner

Outnumbered parents 'become real-life lovers'

Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, who play Pete and Sue Brockman in the hit BBC1 sitcom, are said to have been quietly dating for over a year.

How we made Outnumbered

'Once the kids were done filming, Hugh Dennis and I would do all the reaction shots to broom handles with wigs on'

As accomplished as leads Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis may be, Outnumbered's best bits have historically come from the kids, their ad hoc delivery giving freshness to an otherwise standard situation comedy. So how will the show fare now they are a full three years older? Change is in the air all round in this special: the bulk of it takes place outside the house, as the Brockmans hit the road to honour one of recently deceased Grandad's final wishes.

Outnumbered Christmas special review

Christmas is the season for catching up with old friends and so Boxing Day night seems an ideal time to entertain the Brockman family.

Just like with last year's Ballot Monkeys, Power Monkeys by writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have worked on their script up to the day of transmission to include as many topical gags as possible. Another similarity between the two shows is that we follow four camps of people with Ballot Monkeys concentrating on the four major parties going into the 2015 General Election. But as this show focuses on the EU Referendum there is only really two campaigns to focus on namely the Vote Remain and Vote Leave groups. Although I do feel that there was probably enough material to focus on just these two groups, I think to keep up the pace that made Ballot Monkeys so enjoyable Hamilton and Jenkin added two more parties just to keep things going. Those parties are the team behind Donald Trump's presidential run as well as two members of Vladimir Putin's staff. I do feel targeting Trump and Putin is quite easy but a lot of the jokes about these two men have already been made elsewhere and I don't think that the writers really had anything new to say about them. So while these segments were funny I think the running joke about Trump not allowing any female journalists to interview him was quite cliched and was done to death. The more interesting parts of the episode involved the two sides of the referendum with the vote leave campaign headed up by the returning Gerry (Andy Nyman) who was working alongside the ultra-patriotic Spencer (Kevin McNally), the focused Preeya (Archie Panjabi) and young Labour supporter Jackie (Gwyneth Keyworth). On the other side of the fence was Oliver (Jack Dee) whose offensive jokes were getting on the nerves of his colleague and fellow remain campaigner Sara (Claire Skinner). It was the interplay between McNally and Panjabi and Skinner and Dee which provided the central highlights of this first episode of Power Monkeys primarily as both sets of performers bounced off each other perfectly. I have to say though I was a little disappointed as I expect a lot more from Hamilton and Jenkin and I feel that Power Monkeys lacked the focus that Ballot Monkeys possessed. That being said I'm going to stick with the show for now as I'm a fan of the majority of the cast and have loved the writers ever since Drop the Dead Donkey. But I'm just hoping the quality of the episodes improve as I would say that the first episode of Power Monkeys was simply a little lacking in big laughs and that's not what I expected from the follow-up to one of the funniest sitcoms of last year.

Jack Dee is all over the EU referendum, it seems. Tonight, he stars as volatile former journalist Oliver, now working at the Conservative HQ's Unity Unit, in a spin-off from the comedy Ballot Monkeys, scripted by Outnumbered creators Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin. Written in the hours before transmission to keep the comedy bang up to date, it satirically follows both sides of the debate, and also has an international dimension, with Donald Trump's plane and Vladimir Putin's office among the settings. Claire Skinner and Amelia Bullmore co-star.

With each show being a stand-alone story, Inside No. 9 has been hit and miss. Last night's, "Nana's Party", showed a family unravelling as secrets were revealed at a birthday bash for an elderly relative.

Angela and Jim were a typical middle-aged suburban couple. Angela (played by Claire Skinner -- best known as the mum in Outnumbered) kept an immaculate home and spoke with an affected posh accent. Jim spent the majority of his time locked in his shed.

Only when Angela's brassy, alcoholic sister Carol turned up with her practical joker husband Pat did the secrets start to spill.

The party turned to farce with flatulent Nana choking on ice cubes and a strippergram arriving as drunken Carol blurted out the revelation of her affair with Jim.

Anybody used to the work of the show's writers and stars, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, will know their comedy always comes with a side order of pathos and weirdness. It doesn't always work but last night it mostly did.