Claire Skinner

One of the biggest problems with TV sitcoms centring on families is what to do when the child actors get older. This is particularly problematic with a show like Outnumbered, which returned for a fifth and final series this week, primarily because the comedy relied on the innocence and naivety of the kids. Almost seven years on, the children are looking incredibly old most noticeably Ramona Marquez who started playing Karen when she was only five. Now twelve years old, Marquez's Karen was the centre of the action this week as parents Pete (Hugh Dennis) and Sue (Claire Skinner) worried that she was fitting in at her new challenging school. To an extent I feel that writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have updated the character well as she has now entered her stroppy pre-teen phase. She is a lot sulkier and I was shocked when I actually heard a swear word come out of her mouth. The school that Karen has been sent to has a very strict dress code and Karen is finding some of the work incredibly hard. She's also not fitting in all that well, as we see when she is forced to spend time with her one of her classmates after school. Karen's problems at school lead the ever-worried Sue to send out a late night e-mail to the parents of her daughter's classmates asking if they've had similar problems. The responses she receives are fairly shocking, prompting Pete to tell her that sending any e-mails after 11pm is a bad mistake. Whilst Karen's problems at school ring true, I was less interested in her search for a missing hamster. It just seemed to me like this story was something that Karen would've done while she's younger and I fail to believe that this new sulky brunette girl would be that bothered about a pet.

Elsewhere Karen's two brothers are more ill-served by the storylines especially Ben (Daniel Roche) who is auditioning for the school play. The character of Ben was great when he was a destructive young lad but as a teenager he seems to be a little lost. Though the thought of him playing the lead in a musical version of Spartacus did raise a few chuckles, this was the least realistic of the three plots. I did feel that there was more truth in the antics of older son Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey) who this week got a dodgy tattoo. This was a rite-of-passage story that a lot of teenagers have experienced and the fact that Jake wanted to remove the body art by the end of the episode was also incredibly realistic. Indeed, one thing that Hamilton and Jenkin have always excelled at is making their comedy feel as believable as possible. That's why Outnumbered worked so well when it started and why, for the most part, it still survives in 2014. Jake and Karen's story suited their progression and Pete and Sue continued to be the stereotypical fretting parents. The main thing I found about this series of Outnumbered, as compared to previous outings, is that I didn't laugh as much. While there were a few chuckles and a couple of titters I mostly felt that the comedy was well-observed but didn't find it funny enough to laugh out loud. Despite this I still found a lot to like about Outnumbered and feel that the chemistry between the five actors is still as fine as it was seven years ago. My only hope is that the Brockman family is given a fitting send-off and Outnumbered gets a suitably anarchic final series.

Pete (Hugh Dennis) is in helpline hell. He's got a bill in his handthat he can't pay because it's for £0.00. The person on the other end of the line is insisting he has to pay it though, because the computer says so. I don't think they would do that. You can't pay £0.00. I've just tried, and my computer says it has to be a sum between £0.01 and £99,999.99.

There are other things in this first episode of Outnumbered (BBC One) that don't ring true to me. Such as Frank Pringle's son having been offered drugs at school by his RE teacher (trying to be a bit edgy there, is it, a bit Bad Education?). Or the email firestorm that goes pinging off at quarter past midnight from the parents of Karen's classmates. Wouldn't happen.

What does it matter? Well, maybe it doesn't. It certainly wouldn't matter if Outnumbered was wildly imaginative or anarchic or surreal or anything like that (if only!). But my (admittedly unscientific) research suggests the people who like Outnumbered are the sort of smug metropolitan middle-class Farrow & Ball families who watch it and go: "Look, it's us, our Caspar slams the door too, hahaha!" I think that's what it's trying to do, it's about recognition. So it should ring true.

I'm not a fan, can you tell? If I wanted to watch families like this I could just go round and watch them, in the flesh. I do, in fact; they're my friends, my own family too if I'm honest. But I like my friends and family more than I like the Brockmans. I have to.

I really don't like the Brockmans. Pete and Sue (Claire Skinner - brilliant actor but not brilliant comic actor) are moany, bickery ditherers, constantly worrying about their dull mediocre problems. The children are simply horrid. Actually, they're hardly children any more; suddenly they're enormous, but that doesn't make them any better, just enormously horrid. Giant parasite children feeding off their own pathetic parents.

It would be OK if they were amusingly or at least entertainingly awful. But they're not, they're tiresome. As are their problems - the usual school issues, a frowned-on tattoo, a lost hamster. Perhaps the hamster is lost inside Pete, a sex game gone wrong? No such luck I'm afraid, that would be way too much fun. The hamster may be under the floorboards, it's probably just gone.

Locating a hamster under the floorboards is just one among the parental crises tackled by Sue and Pete (Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) as they return for a fifth - and final - series of the sitcom that makes a virtue out of being out-manoeuvred by your offspring. The kids are no longer cute youngsters, their barbed teenage backchat more sullen than sparky. Except for the now strapping Ben (Daniel Roche), who has high hopes of landing a part in his school's production of Spartacus: The Musical.

Radio Times review

It's now possible to measure the passage of time not just by how your own children have grown up but by the way the Outnumbered kids have changed. And it's frightening.

Little Karen has started secondary school and is almost unrecognisable with her dark, swishy hairstyle, while 14-year-old Ben is much bigger than older brother Jake, who's got a tattoo, sideburns and is learning to drive. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner look exactly the same, though.

It's gently entertaining but somehow the cheeky dialogue that made us laugh when delivered by cute yet precocious children back in 2007 doesn't sound so funny coming from teenagers.

Hugh Dennis & Claire Skinner interview

TV Choice meets Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner who play Pete and Sue Brockman...

Grayson Perry is one of the names - alongside writer/director Kate Hardie - behind this touching tale of a transvestite struggling to come to terms with his urge to dress as a woman. The fear and self-loathing plaguing young Gary (Tom Brooke) are made flesh in the form of Tommy McDonnell's Frank, an obnoxious "inner voice" that adds pathos to a subtle drama that probes aspects of self-identity with wit and intelligence. Neil Dudgeon and Claire Skinner add sterling support.

I am still a little worried that Harvey Easter, the indefatigably cheery protaganist of Mr Blue Sky, will someday soon rip the mask of optimism from his face and go on a killing rampage, starting with his live-in son-in-law-to-be. As this young man, a grimestep DJ who is paid in energy drinks and therefore returns to the Easter household at 5am on a Red Bull high, is called Kill-R, it will give Harvey the opportunity to snarl: "Who's the killer now?" as he takes aim.

When I reviewed last year's first series of Andrew Collins' slow-burning hit comedy, I thought Harvey was bound to 'reverse into gloom' at some stage. The second series opened with his entire family kidnapped and replaced almost wholesale by the cast of TV's Outnumbered, but plucky old Harvey just got on with the job of being happy.

So Mark Benton's Harvey, a performance which is an essay in finely nuanced felicity (and how much harder must this be to play than the sobs of a broken man?) didn't falter even though the detached irony of Rebecca Front, last year's Mrs E, was replaced by Claire Skinner bringing with her Tyger Drew-Honey, both from Outnumbered. Skinner is the leading exponent of wringing comedic value out of the middle-class mum, determined never to yell "Because I said so." And I'm sure I'll get used to her in this, but for now I can't imagine her without chiselled-jawed, puppy-eyed Hugh Dennis as the husband who is a perpetual disappointment.

Tyger took over the role of 16-year-old Robbie with aplomb, asking for money to buy fruit - street slang for drugs - while their older child and bride-to-be, Charlie, was played by Rosamund Hanson with a quirkiness heightened by what was either a speech impediment or a plethora of tongue piercings. The darkness in this solidly engineered comedy, it transpires, is not embedded in Harvey's alter-ego, but swirls all around him as he attempts to hold it back like the tone-deaf, out-of-condition superhero he is.

Preview: Mr Blue Sky series two

Second season of Andrew Collins' warmly cosy Radio 4 comedy, starring Claire Skinner and Rosamund Hanson.

Sue and Pete (Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis) decide to go on holiday to the Canary Islands... on Christmas Day. Cue a well-worked against-the-clock farce involving a dental emergency, a house-sitting sister whose boyfriend may or may not have a criminal record, and a visit to Sue's father (the excellent David Ryall) in hospital.

After four years and as many series, this sitcom about the daily life of a middle-class family in south London still manages that rare feat of being genuinely funny. Tonight's festive special follows the misadventures of Pete Brockman (Hugh Dennis) and his wife Sue (Claire Skinner) as they take their family to the Canary Islands. They're hoping to spend a sunny, stress-free Christmas - doubtless a prelude to a comic disaster.