Daniel Ryan

Fairly happily married Lisa (Sally Lindsay) lives in suburban Manchester close to her nearest and dearest. She can barely pucker her lips for a kiss from hubby Dan (Daniel Ryan), let alone roll up her sleeves for a scrap with him, without her dotty parents, airhead best mate or brassy boss interrupting.

It's like an upmarket Shameless - on which writer Sarah Hooper cut her teeth - but the characters are even broader. Still, this first episode rattles along pleasantly enough, as a paranoid Lisa frets that Dan has forgotten their tenth anniversary. It's when her boss temporarily moves in, having chucked a feckless boyfriend, that the fun and games really begin.

Mount Pleasant cast interview

Recently we got to sit down and ask Adrian Bower, Sian Reeves, Neil Fitzmaurice, Sally Lindsay and Daniel Ryan from Sky1's upcoming comedy/drama Mount Pleasant...

Mount Pleasant: New comedy starring Sally Lindsay

Sally Lindsay, Siân Reeves and Daniel Ryan star in Mount Pleasant, a new eight-part comedy due to start on Sky One on Wednesday 24 August 2011.

The importance of seizing life's windows of opportunity was not lost on the team behind the Beeb's other post-Christmas winner [aside from Toast], Just William. Not that it would have taken a casting director of genius to realise that Daniel Roche - the 11-year-old actor who played Ben in Outnumbered - was born to play William Brown, Richmal Crompton's schoolboy anti-hero.

With his natural curls and even more natural scowl, Roche brought Brown to life as no other child actor has before. But what really elevated Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye's adaptation were the moments inbetween young William's adventures and the painstaking attention to detail of its early 1950s period setting.

With an adult cast including Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan as the long-suffering senior Browns, and Warren Clarke and Caroline Quentin as the nouveau riche Botts, Nye's four episodes - perhaps taking inspiration from The Simpsons - fully appreciated that there was room here for all the characters to manoeuvre. There were storylines involving William's sister Ethel, subplots based around the staff at William's school, visits from members of the extended Brown family and, of course, the sthpectacularly sthpoilt Violet Elizabeth.

The sharpness of the script was evident from episode one, in which William's brother Robert, newly obsessed with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, had this exchange with his mother: Robert [mumbling]: "I need to go somewhere." Mrs Brown [not looking up]: "If you're passing the shop could you buy a loaf of bread?" Robert: "No, I need to escape. I'm going to join a biker gang." Mrs Brown: "Righto. Maybe you should borrow Mr Nuttley's motorbike and see if you like it first."

Who of us brought up in the stifling atmosphere of the suburbs will not have had a similar early life exchange, in which a burning passion is reduced, with a seen-it-all-sigh, to the status of hobby?

Thus, while Toast and Just William were both unashamedly nostalgic, both also carried off the crucial trick of ringing true to a 21st-century audience. Good writing, fine acting and a past (unlike the foreign country of Upstairs, Downstairs) that we can all remember and relate to.

It's not too much to ask for is it? And especially at a time of year when, for many of us, the televison screen is the window of opportunity in the corner of all of our living-rooms.

Outnumbered's bloodthirsty Ben is a William for our times, so the casting of actor Daniel Roche, so brilliant as the violence-obsessed middle child in the hit BBC1 sitcom, is perfect. The sublime Martin Jarvis, who is William to so many of us, thanks to his peerless readings of Richmal Crompton's tales on Radio 4, narrates a series of four stories (daily until New Year's Eve). Here William and the Outlaws first encounter insufferable Violet Elizabeth Bott, the be-ribboned, lisping brat who manipulates everyone with her threats to "thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I'm thick". Warren Clarke and, particularly, Caroline Quentin have a whale of a time as Violet Elizabeth's vulgar, nouveau riche parents (dad is the Bott's Digestive Sauce magnate), while Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan are sweetly forbearing as William's mum and dad. It's aimed at kids, but adults will have fun, too, if only as they look back fondly on a world where children could play outside for hours on end and the sun always seemed to shine.