Dawn French

"Why are we standing here, two grown people, having a row about fish fingers?" Alfred Molina and Dawn French continue to carry this downbeat comedy with admirable restraint, tonight having an argument over Roger's bonsai seeds being in the same fridge that Val has put the tea in. It's stagey, due to its minimal set and cast, but there's a warm familiarity to its homely setting that somehow makes it work.

Pedantic botanist Roger (Alfred Molina) returns home from work to find his wife Val (Dawn French) has put his fish finger supper in the fridge strictly reserved for his seedlings. The ensuing row encompasses warring water voles, the colour of the living room sofa, and cheese and onion crisps. With just two characters and one set, this comedy series verges on the stagey. The performances, however, are finely nuanced, and the script expertly highlights the intimacies shared by long-standing couples. "You look great in a cagoule," Roger tells Val tenderly.

As a newlywed, I thought at first that there could be no worse choice of viewing than Roger and Val Have Just Got In (BBC Two, Friday), a docile new sitcom featuring Dawn French and the Hollywood actor Alfred Molina as the fiftysomething married couple in the title. So this is what lies in store after the honeymoon tan has faded? Endless grey years of getting in from work, putting the kettle on and squabbling over who did what with the Hoover guarantee?

All was not, however, entirely how it seemed. Instead of emphasising the mundane nature of middle-class, suburban married life in order to mock it, Office-style, this was in fact a quiet homage to the things that make a relationship work.

The premise for the series is simple: each episode covers the half-hour after Roger and Val get home from their slightly cuddly jobs. Val is a "food technology" schoolteacher and Roger is a botanist at a garden centre. They compare notes on their day and, in the first episode, hunted for a guarantee whose disappearance forced them to confront the horror of horrors - a filing system known as "the big drawer".

Yes, as drama goes there is about as much happening here as there is in Waiting for Godot, or a day of Test cricket, or in Peter Andre's brain, but that is the point. This is a celebration of the soporific.

"If I was to rear up in the wild," said Roger, pondering his professional relationship with a lawyer at work, "she would neither attack me nor eat me. We would rub alongside one another like a lizard and a bat." Val listened to this nonsense indulgently, and Roger in turn humoured her when she launched into a monologue on a woman at school who had "a coat for every type of weather".

The small acts of give and take offered a believable glimpse of a time-worn but working marriage. Not all was low-watt contentment though: a misguided phone call prompted a row, we learnt that Roger's father was seriously ill and there were hints of sadness when the couple referred to their childlessness. Not exactly enough to make anyone cry - or laugh out loud for that matter - but the layered pettiness and tragedy of a typical afternoon yielded a warm, subtle humour.

Molina managed an impressive transition from movie star battling superheroes in Spider-Man 2 to Mr Average battling a stack of unfiled paperwork. French, meanwhile, was on good, likeable form, though her performance was more likely to evince Vicar of Dibley-style chuckles than French and Saunders raucous shrieks.

By the end, Roger and Val had won me over and I'd stopped having nightmarish hallucinations about spending my silver wedding anniversary staring at a wall. The lack of glitz was charming, in its way. Who'd want to be Sex and the City's Samantha, bonking your way round Manhattan in a succession of silly outfits, when you could be Val, sitting at home with a cup of tea watching your husband mist-spray a potted basil plant?

TV Review: Roger and Val & Pete Versus Life

Ceri Radford reviews the weekend on television including Roger and Val Have Just Got In, the new BBC sitcom starring Dawn French and Alfred Molina, and new five-part comedy drama Pete Versus Life (Channel 4).

The new show Roger & Val is not perfect by any means. Sometimes the performances tip over a trifle into sitcom mannerism, and there's a slight, odd stillness to the direction that sometimes makes it feel a little claustrophobic.

But that may be the intent; the show is based on the 1st half hour after a couple Roger & Val get home from work: the bit where two lives re-merge, in a swirl of eddies and cross currents. As such, it's a purposefully small world - a two hander between Alfred Molina and Dawn French, playing with a dense, multi-layered, tapestry-fine script. You can see why Molina and French - neither exactly desperate for work - went for the roles. Unlike most sitcoms, you genuinely don't know what's going to happen next: a fairly extraordinary turn of events when the first episode revolves around Roger & Val merely looking through their 'big drawer' for the guarantee for the Hoover.

Roger's too-interested mention of Angela from Legal is worked in with exquisite poised delicacy - like a Victorian micro-mosaic brooch. The build up to a wholly inappropriate phone call to her lands as sure footed as a tiger. And by the time Val goes temporarily insane - tearing up the hoover guarantee and throwing it all over the garage floor - you have your hand over your mouth in shock. At this point I feel excited about next week's episode. Almost nervous. It feels like it has a whole, dark, alarming world to explore just in Roger & Val's kitchen.

I suppose Roger & Val Have Just Got In (Friday, BBC Two) qualifies as a sitcom, but somehow this does it a disservice. Alfred Molina and Dawn French play a married couple who spend their time chatting in an apparently inconsequential way. In the first episode, they also went through their drawers looking for a guarantee for their vacuum cleaner.

Beth Kilcoyne and Emma Kilcoyne's script was beautifully observed - and superbly performed by Molina and French. This too had a washed-out sort of look. It was only slowly that Roger and Val's colour, and their idiosyncrasies, came to the surface. The show wasn't roaringly funny, but then it doesn't set out to be. Instead it's charming, intriguing and full of that rarest of qualities, emotional truth.

Which leaves us with the gentle sitcom Roger & Val Have Just Got In to keep us away from the barbequeue. And you know, it may just succeed. The cruel would suggest that this is a sort of middlebrow update of Terry & June: middle class couple come home from work & talk about the petty vicissitudes of life; the trivial, the mildly irritating.

The first episode involved them looking for a guarantee for a vacuum cleaner in a drawer filled with household detritus. That was it: nothing more. And it worked. The script was fine and restrained and even on occasion approached the level of Alan Bennett. But the real pleasure was in the performances of Dawn French and Alfred Molina, which were lovely, quite exquisite. Mind you, I write as someone who adored the Vicar of Dibley and thinks Dawn French can do no wrong.

If you liked Rev, you might also enjoy Roger and Val - another comedy whose selling point is that it's not trying to be funny.

To be honest, I don't know why the BBC doesn't admit this is a drama and be done with it. Even Dawn French, who stars in it and whose idea it was, has described it as "a tragedy". Perhaps they're trying to hook passing Vicar Of Dibley fans.

It's a two-hander with French and Alfred Molina as a comfortably married couple. We spend half an hour with them in real time, at the point when they have just got in from work and are catching up with one another. And watching it is like eavesdropping on old friends as they natter away about nothing much in particular.

Tonight, they are looking for the guarantee for their vacuum cleaner. Inevitably, as they search through the clutter of their lives, some painful personal issues surface as well.

Ever thought those utterly mundane events that clutter up our day-to-day existence would make compelling subjects for a hilarious new sitcom? Do you find yourself bent double with laughter when you spend 10 minutes looking for your car keys only to discover they were in your pocket all along? Do you split your sides every time you forget to tell the milkman you're going on holiday for a fortnight? Clearly quite a few people at the BBC do.

As you may have gleaned from the title, the action in this new sitcom centres round the thrilling half-hour when Roger (Alfred Molina) and Val (Dawn French) return home from work. The central plot of last night's opener was a broken vacuum cleaner and a missing receipt, all of which led to a tiresome 10 minutes of the couple rifling through the contents of their "big drawer" and musing about all manner of subjects like death, door knockers and two-for-one Specsavers vouchers.

Roger and Val are the only cast members, giving the whole thing something of the feel of a night out at a provincial theatre. Worst of all was the self-consciously "real" script that practically tripped over itself in a bid to reel off the banalities of everyday life in a smug middle-class home. The overall effect came across like a Harold Pinter-scripted episode of Terry & June - although that's probably a little too flattering.

Roger & Val Have Just Got In doubtless thinks of itself as a "bittersweet comedy" by default, thanks to its lack of laughter track and the fact the action plays out in real time. They'd be onto something if either Roger or Val were in any way likeable or amusing. If you're looking to get your kicks by guffawing at banal bickering, it's probably best to stick to The Royle Family, which does this sort of thing so much better.

In a world of gags and instant gratification, Roger and Val is a bold comedy commission. Even more so when one considers the action (such as it is) is restricted to one set and a middle-aged couple: Alfred Molina (as botanist and class warrior Roger) and Dawn French (long-suffering teacher Val).

In tonight's opener, the hunt for the guarantee slip leads to the exhumation of the Big Drawer and with it, a trove of hazy memories and vague regrets.

The watchword is realism and the script is well up to the mark, subtly and sympathetically reflecting the minutiae of marriage. If anything, it's almost too acutely observed: conversations meander all too authentically and French occasionally hams to fill the dead air. But Molina is wonderful and there's real chemistry between the leads. The hand of exec producer Hugo Blick (Marion & Geoff) also looms large, and with it the hope that this series holds handsome rewards for the patient.