Dawn French

Dawn French and Alfred Molina star in this downbeat new sitcom. As the title suggests, it's about a couple pottering around at home in the first half-hour after work, winding down, putting the kettle on, thinking about death, that sort of thing: Beckett with a nice biscuit. Tonight's opener revolves around a missing vacuum cleaner receipt, legal issues at work and the threat of the Big Drawer.

This is a strange new comedy series. It depicts a middle-aged couple during the half-hour after they get in from work. Dawn French plays Val, a waddling teacher of "food technology" whose level of expertise is not so much Auguste Escoffier as King Alfred. Her devoted, slightly simple botanist husband Roger is played by Alfred Molina - more often seen in Hollywood blockbusters than chamber comedy these days - who manfully wrestles with a succession of trite homilies and telegraphed gags in his role.

Shot vérité style and in real time, drained of colour and canned laughter, the programme attempts to underpin its gentle observational humour with the pathos of childless marriage, but only occasionally succeeds. Too often the dialogue, in its desire to appear simultaneously portentous and amusing, instead falls in the gap between funny and moving.

Written by twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne, Roger and Val... in some ways exemplifies the great BBC quandary: how do you remind the public that their £145.50 a year is not being entirely wasted on executives, while also making them laugh and all the while continuing to employ Dawn French? Head of Comedy Mark Freeland has conceded that "not everyone will get it". I fear that unless you've sweated out long nights hoping that Marion and Geoff would breed with The Vicar of Dibley, you'll fall into the "not everyone" camp.

Notionally a sitcom, this series defies easy categorisation. It's not funny, though its portrait of a comfortably long marriage may provoke the odd smile of recognition, and it's not particularly substantial. It is, though, rather sweet. Alfred Molina and Dawn French are Roger and Val, a devoted, mildly chaotic couple whose complete familiarity with each other's personality tics and traits means they're happily at ease as they chat about the day's events. Nothing happens. The first episode centres on Val's determination to find the guarantee for a broken vacuum cleaner, which leads them both to reminisce as they sort through the accretions of married life - the aged bills, bank statements and holiday souvenirs. As they do so, we glimpse snippets of their personalities. Roger is a febrile, nervy pedant, while Val is a worrier. They both want to rebel, even in tiny ways, but they can't summon the energy. Molina and French make it work; in lesser hands it would just fizzle away.

This gentle comedy has been bouncing around the schedules for months, but has finally landed on Friday nights. Starring Dawn French and Alfred Molina as a comfortably-married middle-aged couple it's far from laugh-out-loud, but an entertaining insight into long-term relationships; we're hoping it's a grower.

We've long looked forward to this Dawn French and Alfred Molina sitcom and it doesn't disappoint. Roger and Val Stevenson are an ordinary middle-aged husband and wife whose lives, feelings and prejudices are revealed in splendid little snapshots as they obsess over mundane, everyday minutiae. In this series opener they've lost the guarantee to their vacuum cleaner, which prompts Val to think deeply about existence and the afterlife, and engage in her own form of corporate protest.

Beth Kilcoyne: Roger and Val Have Just Got In

Nearly three years ago a card dropped through my door and when I had read it I started running round my house, screaming. This is because the card was from Dawn French, who had seen a comedy written by me and my sister Emma and it invited us to go to a meeting with her.

Dawn's new comedy partner: Roger and Val

If Dawn French's recent marriage breakdown is affecting her, she's hiding it well behind that famously wide smile and flirtatious giggle. The brave face is especially admirable given that she's promoting her new project, Roger And Val Have Just Got In, a two-person comedy which explores the intricacies of a marriage.

French and Molina on Roger and Val Have Just Got In

Dawn French and Alfred Molina star in a new BBC sitcom about 'the hardest thing in the world': being happily married. James Rampton reports.

As the lovably hapless Tom Hollander shone his way though the comedic murk of Rev, it was hard to escape the feeling that this gentle sitcom was merely The Vicar of Dibley in reverse. Where that show had Dawn French playing an inner-city cleric transposed to a country setting, this new series saw a rural reverend trying to make the best of his east London posting.

Aimed, perhaps, at those who loved Dibley but found Father Ted too sweary, Hollander had the good grace to remove his dog collar before uttering the "F" word and the show, for all its try-hard 21st-century references and excellent supporting cast, came across as old-fashioned as Derek Nimmo's All Gas and Gaiters. A programme, it must be noted, that hit screens in the same year that John Lennon declared the Beatles "more popular than Jesus".

Tom Hollander makes a bid here to join Derek Nimmo and Dawn French in the small but cosy pantheon of sitcom vicars. He plays the Reverend Adam Smallbone, a well-meaning, unshaven, east London clergyman who smokes, drinks enthusiastically and does the splits at parties, but is sweetly ineffectual in the face of the problems he faces. They include a domineering archdeacon and a rash of pushy parents hoping to get their children into "his" C of E school, whose headmistress Smallbone clearly fancies. It's a gentle, ragged sort of comedy, short on belly laughs but with enough character-led jokes to offer hope for good things to come. Alexander Armstrong brings his expert comic timing to the role of a bluff MP who is one of the "On your knees, avoid the fees" crowd. The wonderful Olivia Colman seems (so far) slightly wasted in the role of the vicar's wife, but given time, and given Hollander's rumpled charm in the lead, it could be a quiet winner.