Emma Kilcoyne

The most common complaint about this gentle, bittersweet comedy about a middle-aged married couple leading a quiet life of domestic dullness is that nothing much happens in it. Curiously, though, that's exactly what its fans consider its chief virtue. Each week writers (and sisters) Beth and Emma Kilcoyne serve up a confection of tragedy-tinged amusements spun entirely from the all-too-recognisable foibles we come to notice over time in ourselves and our partners, the games we play, the delusions we hide behind. That said, by its normal standards, this week's show is packed with incident: an unusually animated Roger (Alfred Molina) arrives home from a long-anticipated employment tribunal, only to have his composure derailed by a doorbell, an email and his subsequent need to make an emotional - and potentially devastating - confession to Val (Dawn French). All this comes against a backdrop of guest lists for imaginary parties, the trials of holidaying in the Scottish Isles, the politics of doodling on tea towels and the sadness that "opening" a new set of cooking pans can induce. Roger and Val may not be to every taste, but for those who love them this is an episode that must not be missed.

Each time Roger and Val opens, you can't quite see how it will pull off the trick again. How will it turn the base metal of daft domestic trivia (a couple chatting, essentially) into lovable TV gold? But each time it does. At some point the tragi-comic inventiveness of writers Beth and Emma Kilcoyne may run dry, but so far so good.

As tonight's instalment opens, it's the eve of Roger's employment tribunal. He has just watched a TV movie that spurs him to practise his speech ("If putting botanical plants before heating and budget costs is a crime, sack me!"). And when Val gets in she has a good luck charm for him: a little wind-up toy of a swimming man, who becomes a brilliant double-edged symbol as the episode goes on. Is he swimming or flailing? Cheery or sinister?

The scene unfolds through one of their absurd, married-couple rambling conversations (Chinese takeaway boxes, evil housekeepers, and so on) and some awkward revelations. Roger is definitely hiding something.

I'm not sure you could kill the jokes in Roger & Val Have Just Got In by explaining them, because there is nothing really to explain except a vague prevailing mood. Beth and Emma Kilcoyne's two-hander returned with Roger fretfully facing an unfair dismissal tribunal and Val excitedly looking forward to an interview for a deputy-headship. As before, they bickered, they procrastinated and, rather sweetly, bucked each other up. And then, right at the end, Roger looked out through the net curtains and saw something that appalled him. Given the way the characters regularly confuse the banal with the earth-shattering it might just be a wilting plant, but it would be worth watching next week either way to find out. It's so low-key it's almost not there, but what is there is great.

In Roger and Val Have Just Got In, Val came back from work with three noodle bakes, two more than she could fit into her refrigerator, which is what passes for a plot highlight in Beth and Emma Kilcoyne's daringly understated comedy. It's something of a noodle bake itself, this series: looping strands of domestic wittering and bickering in a sauce of beautifully cooked blandness, not exactly a showy dish, but reassuring and comforting in its ordinariness. I could quote lines at you all day without being able to make a convincing case for it, because it's all about context and the recognisability of the moment. As Roger and Val, Alfred Molina and Dawn French underplay it beautifully, commiserating with each other about the day's minor setbacks (11 dead rice plants for Roger, who works as a botanist at the Winter Gardens, and feels about exotic flora as Martin Clunes does about Chester) and never talking about the big drama in their life - the death of a child, the illness of a parent - things that you glimpse as if out of the corner of your eye in passing. The programme takes half an hour to go nowhere, but it's those unmentioned griefs that make it work. It's just how life goes on, quite substantial portions of it sustained by gentle self-deception and the magnification of stuff that doesn't really matter.

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.