Frances Barber

If anything was going to put you off your Ferrero Rochers over Christmas, it had to be The Fattest Man in Britain, ITV's comedy drama about a man in an orthopaedic armchair eating himself to merry hell. Timothy Spall looked dangerously at home in the title role as Georgie, with comedian Bobby Ball admirably cast as his "manager", Morris, turning up with a cabful of Japanese tourists eager to take pictures and lay their hands on the big man's folds. "I would ask you to respect Georgie's private zones," said Morris (though, frankly, you imagined these people might get enough blubber at home). Frances Barber completed the homely trio as Janice, who came in every day to shovel Georgie's meals together and grease his legs, which was as attractive as it sounds.

With Caroline Aherne co-scripting, there was as much pleasing northern drollery as you'd expect amid the ill-lit claustrophobic clutter and junk food and trash TV familiar from The Royle Family, though admittedly the oxygen tank looked ominous.

Things took a turn when a crew of youths was sent by the social services to tidy the garden and Amy - a pregnant teenager on the run from a violent boyfriend - ended up moving in. Aisling Loftus was excellent as the underfed, beaten waif looking for a father figure and finding it in kindly Georgie. There was a worrying moment, in his late mother's bedroom, when you wondered what kind of a comedy this was turning into... but no, Amy was soon settling in, cooking and tidying up, nibbling a dark chocolate Magnum with Georgie (not the classiest of product endorsements), helping Janice with his pig-sized legs and restyling his terrible 80s mullet - an early clue that he hadn't been out in 23 years. That's how long it had been since his mum died. "It's like I was eating for her," Georgie confided. "Like there was an angel on my fork."

All was well until a rival barrage balloon from Birmingham challenged Georgie to a TV weigh-in and Morris - aided by locals arriving with mountains of pizza and bakewell tarts - set to bulking him up for the contest. Amy - now almost as big as Georgie (well, not quite, but who remembered she was even pregnant?) - railed against the freak show that would surely kill him.

Events were channelled into a poignant denouement, but when the baby died and Amy called it a day with Georgie, it didn't feel like tragedy. Even when Georgie rose from his chair and struggled down the street to see her, it was more Love Actually than love. There was a late attempt at profundity with a short disquisition about the desire to make failure look like success. "If I'm not the fattest man in Britain, what am I?" cried Georgie. "I'm just a fat man!" It was a great line, but it just made me think that inside this broadly entertaining drama was a sharper, less funny one trying to get out.

This unexpectedly moving one-off comedy drama, co-written by The Royle Family's Caroline Aherne, stars an excellent Timothy Spall as Georgie Godwin, a Rochdale man so obese he hasn't left his house in 15 years. He lives on pizzas and mask-delivered oxygen, and needs his hardened calves to be massaged regularly by his carer, Janice (Frances Barber). Keeping him in sausage rolls is his sprightly "manager", Morris Morrissey (a splendid Tommy Ball), who charges tourists to gawp at Godwin's 50-stone frame. With Aherne's ribald northern humour (even the banner outside Godwin's neighbour's house, "Happy 30th Nana", is funny), the drama manages to be touching and fearlessly forthright as well as amusing.

Sometimes you just have to admit you were wrong. And, as Beautiful People limed to a disappointing conclusion, the bloom had well and truly left the cheeks of Jonathan Harvey's saga of a high camp Reading childhood.

So forget all the praise I'd heaped on it back in the beginning because all the decent jokes and imaginative set pieces got used up in the first two episodes. After that point, it went downhill quicker than Jonathan Ross's bargaining power at the BBC.

Even the arrival of Frances Barber as a madly bohemian teacher couldn't rescue Beautiful People's decline into limp-wristed cliché. Quite why Barber, an actress who could turn the weather forecast into a Greek tragedy, isn't a major star is just one of life's inexplicable injustices.

Jonathan Harvey's sitcom bows out with a guest appearance from Frances Barber as a new teacher at school, while young Simon and Kylie attempt to leave Reading behind to join the beautiful people in London. While each episode of this series has had bad patches, at its best it's been beautifully observed and frequently uproarious. Let's hope life in 1997 Reading isn't over quite yet, as a second series would be most welcome.

Edge Falls, your out of town retail Mecca, the comic brain child of Paul Barnhill and Neil Warhurst, returns. Mark Benton plays Mick, hapless head of security. Frances Barber plays the ingenious promotions manager Sonya, raising a giant pink inflatable love heart over the shops to bring in the pink pound. And all the staff has to be gay friendly too, but only to friendly gays (nothing ostentatious). We're gay for the day, says Sonya, before she spots what she thinks is a bit of hanky panky in the carpark. The spoof commercials are a treat, though.