Elaine Cassidy

No Offence is Paul "Shameless" Abbott's not-at-all-for-everyone but deeply funny take on that most perilous of portmanteaus, the police comedy. It's done splendidly in America's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but there played mainly for laughs. Here, it's more serious - can't get much more cloacal than a serial murderer targeting Down's syndrome girls in rainy Manc - and the humour is more staccato and scatological. A terrific Joanna Scanlan is unapologetically, vividly, chunky, sweaty and sweary, and deeply real - in that one can, simultaneously, laugh, sympathise and do a little sickie in one's own mouth when her DI character very publicly spritzes with, in turn, breath spray and vaginal deodorant, then announces an urgent loo visit because she got the two mixed up. Elaine Cassidy as Dinah, the Polish-descended DC, is in possession of the cojones, and what passes in that world for the glamour. If Abbott's tricksy thinking, to have a deep vein of below-skirt humour mesh with an otherwise bleak-indeed crime drama, is to be fully realised - and I think it is - these two alone look to be a dream pairing.

The women are the best thing on No Offence

Joanna Scanlan, Elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach were on top form in the gritty, funny cop show...

Paul Abbott's new Manchester-set police drama starts with a bang as you would expect. Dina (Elaine Cassidy) is a determined, unafraid powerhouse of policing; Joy (Alexandra Roach) is her nervy colleague; and Joanna Scanlan is Viv, their boss. It's the women who lead this, and brilliant support comes fromPaul Ritter and Will Mellor. We didn't really need another police drama but, if there has to be one, Abbott is the man for the job. It thrusts and bulges with his energy and heart while avoiding procedural cliche. A brilliant start.

Radio Times review

There's a breathless and brutal opening to this coarse, crude, rude, often very funny Paul Abbott comedy drama as a young detective, Dinah Kowalska, chases a suspect through the streets of Manchester.

Kowalska (Elaine Cassidy) is a highly capable woman who's in with a shot at making detective sergeant. But her terrifying boss Detective Inspector Vivienne Deering (the magnificent Joanna Scanlan, from The Thick of It and Getting On) wants a little word with her first.

Abbott is a past master at creating brilliantly well-rounded, realistic women characters (Shameless, State of Play) and Deering, who is eye-wateringly forthright (truly, No Offence is not for the faint-hearted) is particularly vivid. And, in the noble tradition of TV cops, she has no truck with authority - her jobsworth boss is the very suave Colin Salmon - as she hunts a serial killer targeting women with Down's syndrome.

No Offence: meet the stars

The women are calling the shots in Paul Abbott's new Manchester-set procedural. We get leads Joanna Scanlan, Alexandra Roach and Elaine Cassidy together to talk blood, sweat, tears (and Bez).

No Offence heading to Australia & Denmark

Channel 4 has lined up deals for the eight episode series starring Joanna Scanlan and Elaine Cassidy with Australian public broadcaster ABC TV and Danish broadcaster DR.

I begin with a chuckle that turns into a lament. The Pickerskill Reports, the series in which a former public school master reminisces in a tone as lacerating as it is fond, is no more. Author and director Andrew McGibbon has declared it's a wrap with The Last Report, bringing bank-holiday merriment with its mix of the scholarly and the fantastical in a one-off special.

The series originally starred Ian Richardson, whose recruitment was a coup in itself and whose performance so matched the withering put-downs and acute insights of the script that all seemed lost for the show after his death in 2007.

Yet producer Curtains For Radio brought the series back in 2009 with another casting triumph - with his reedy-voiced enunciation and donnish demeanour, Ian McDiarmid stepped effortlessly into the other Ian's footsteps. This new play finds McDiarmid in full flight, relishing the effortless dialogue ("brandishing your braggadocio"), high-table erudition and gentle, literate comedy that can turn savage in a second.

As the 'progressive' head, Michael Feast fuses the sinister and the cynical, while Tony Gardner is the spluttering maths master Lefty, around whom Thomas Brodie-Sangster's precocious pupil, Porter, runs rings. With her girlish politeness, Elaine Cassidy is the antithesis of a villainess - until she is revealed to be working for the kind of suspect organisation beloved of 1960's TV series such as The Avengers.

Before Richardson's death, there was dangerous talk of a transfer to television, but perhaps The Pickerskill Reports is best remembered as one of radio's timeless jewels.

Very last episode of the witty social satire, blessed by a superb cast (Ian McDiarmid, Mark Heap and Michael Feast), written and directed by Andrew McGibbon. McDiarmid plays the wily head of a school which has gone through many transformations and whose past pupils duly represent the fact, whether pillars of the establishment, captains of industry or various other grades of dodgy geezer. Now meet Faye (Elaine Cassidy) who will save its site from mercantile exploitation to transform it into a beacon of the new educational ethos.

This long-running black comedy starring Ian McDiarmid as Dr Pickerskill, a retired English master looking back at the lives of his most entertaining pupils at Haunchurst School, draws to a close with a special send-off. In The Final Report, written by Andrew McGibbon, Pickerskill has to contend with a charismatic cult leader called Faye, whose shady sect, The Constancy, is planning to take over the college. Elaine Cassidy and Mark Heap also star.

Since 2005, darkly comic series The Pickerskill Reports has been an important part of Radio 4's schedule. Set just after the Second World War at Haunchurst College, an English public school, it follows the reminiscences of retired English teacher Dr Pickerskill (played by Ian McDiarmid). On Monday 27 May, the series comes to an end with Haunchurst facing the threat of a takeover by cult leader and former pupil Faye Hornette (played by Elaine Cassidy). Daily Telegraph radio critic Gillian Reynolds has praised the series, saying: "The Pickerskill Reports invites you into a very interesting, tightly controlled world. It's very subversive and anarchic but you never feel uncomfortable."