Elizabeth Berrington

If you were miffed when Ruth Jones stopped writing Gavin & Stacey with James Corden, don't worry - it freed her up to create this charming comedy.

Ruth plays the title character, a 42-year-old mum juggling her washing and ironing job with raising two of her kids, and visiting the third in jail.

She's the kind of character who could have easily become a caricature but in Jones's hands, she is nothing short of superb.

All of the other characters are brilliantly drawn, too. We especially like Stella's best friend Paula (Elizabeth Berrington), a fully functional alcoholic and a funeral director. The visual and verbal humour is sharp, but it is also subtle so you need to give the show your full attention.

You might, however, want to close your eyes when star turn Gillian McKeith appears. She's playing a Lizzie Webb-type version of herself. Gillian, lycra and a Swiss ball - we're going to have nightmares for years.

Ruth Jones, of Gavin & Stacey fame, basks in the easy humour of this sharply observed comedy set in the Welsh Valleys, which she co-wrote. Jones plays Stella, a divorcee whose chaotic life involves bringing up three children (one of whom is in jail), dealing with her eccentric friends and coping with not having had sex for two years. The series's appeal balances on her nicely underwritten role and there are some great performances, notably from Elizabeth Berrington as an alcoholic funeral director, and Steve Spiers as a lovelorn lollipop man.

Ruth Jones writes and stars in a new Wales-set comedy drama about working mum-of-three Stella, her alcoholic best friend (played by Elizabeth Berrington) and various other supporting characters. Jones has powerful screen appeal and her script radiates all of the charm of Gavin & Stacey, with rather fewer of the cynical set pieces that so often marred it. Tonight, Stella visits her eldest son in prison, discovers her daughter is on the pill and finds an unusual alternative when she forgets to make her young son's costume for the school play.

Olivier Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne turns his hand to TV comedy tonight, with this one-off special about a close-knit Birkenhead family who decide to pull out the stops and go to Lapland for Christmas. It stars the excellent Sue Johnston - best known as Barbara Royle from The Royle Family - as the family's benevolent matriarch, Eileen; with support from a strong ensemble cast, including Elizabeth Berrington (Waterloo Road) as her overstressed daughter Paula and Stephen Graham (This Is England) as her long-suffering son Pete. Being a British comedy, it doesn't take long for the infighting to start, and the film contains a handful of smartly observed scenes that will be familiar to many viewers - from the grandmother being used as a permanently on-call nanny by her own children, to the simmering family grievances vented after a few glasses of sherry, to the difficulty of keeping older siblings from spoiling the magic of Father Christmas for their younger brothers and sisters. At points, this takes the programme more into the realm of edgy, Shameless-style drama than gentle festive comedy; but Wynne manages to sugar the pill with a good deal of warm Northern humour.

Using the same denouement measurement, the mess of the ending of May Contain Nuts - after such a brilliant start - showed what a parlous waste of time it had become. The nice parents who cheated to get their daughter into a good school (mother sat an entrance exam as her daughter, below) renounced their snobbishness. The really snobby mother (Elizabeth Berrington, the only compelling actor on screen) got a telling-off for her attitudes. But bizarrely the racism at the heart of the drama was never directly addressed, although those that practised it were shown to be idiots. This satire on competitive middle-class parenting was blunted by a script that descended into dumb farce and screechy over-acting that descended far lower than that.

Anyway, from its terrible casting (an exception is made for Elizabeth Berrington's fabulously cartoon-vile uber-mum, Ffion) to its uncomfortable script (in one how-could-this-ever-have-made-the-edit? scene, Boyd's David watches Alice dress up as an 11-year-old and admits he's "really turned on") to its total dislocation from any audience demographic I can think of, May Contain Nuts was fairly disastrous on every conceivable level.