Hugh Dennis

What do you get when you cross Hugh Dennis and Neil Morrissey with an unremarkable script about a weatherman and his woes? This one-off comedy from Doug Naylor, co-creator of Red Dwarf. Dennis stars as Bill Onion, a middle-aged TV weatherman fired from the BBC and trying to claw his way back with the help of his best friend Jez (Morrissey), Jez's hostile wife (Helen George) and his own wife (Tracy-Ann Oberman). It's the first of three new pilot episodes in a revamp of the BBC's Comedy Playhouse strand.

Radio Times review

Hugh Dennis is Bill, a hangdog weatherman who is sacked from the BBC and replaced by a stunning young woman. Infuriated, bitter Bill sets out to find another job, this time with C4. It's not much of a premise for a comedy, but then Over to Bill isn't much of a comedy.

It's supposed to be a comedy (written by Red Dwarf's Doug Naylor) because it's part of a brief revival of the much-loved Comedy Playhouse strand, which produced abiding hits Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part and The Liver Birds.

But Over to Bill won't trouble the comedy stratosphere like those classics. There are jokes about the accidental drinking of breast-milk, emergency present-buying from a garage and a particularly tasteless routine about bone marrow transplants. Neil Morrissey and Call the Midwife's Helen George co-star as Bill's shallow friends.

Radio Times review

Television loves birthdays and anniversaries, so how much more exciting can it get than actually having an excuse to celebrate one of its own milestones with a special season of programmes? BBC Two is 50 years old this year (surely not, doesn't she look young?) and the festivities will be sprinkled across the schedules throughout the year.

Here Dara O'Briain and Pointless's Richard Osman hosts a 50th birthday quiz where celebrities are asked questions about BBC Two stars and programmes across the years. Guests include Hugh Dennis, Hairy Biker Dave Myers and Professor Brian Cox.

So after seven years and five series we must say farewell to Outnumbered (BBC One), which has at last been outmanoeuvred by Mother Nature and the pulsating endocrine systems of its now only semi-juvenile leads. Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey), Ben (Daniel Roche) and Karen (Ramona Marquez) were 11, eight and six respectively when the sitcom about life in the overscheduled, underdisciplined Brockman household began in 2007. Now Karen looks like a 25-year-old model, Jake is a tangle of gangling limbs and Ben - well, Ben still looks like Ben, but galumphs stolidly now rather than pinballs round the house, more usually mortified these days than gratified by the havoc he creates.

In the beginning, most of the art and all of the craft went into assembling the children's semi-improvised performances into workable narrative wholes. As the exhausted parents, Claire Skinner and Hugh Dennis gave lovely, understated and endlessly, beautifully generous performances that left the children room to perform while gently trammelling them in the right direction. It was all very ... parental, really, and doubtless almost as exhausting as the real thing.

But now the kids have minds, scripts and marks of their own. They manage them all very well. To say that the magic is gone is not to do them a disservice but simply to recognise that Outnumbered was a series built round the unfakeable pre-adolescent world-weariness of the 11-year-old oldest child, the irreproducible childish ebullience of Ben and - words almost fail me. What was it about Karen? The sense of nascent megalomania within? The slow, styptic blink when she spotted an inconsistency in an adult's story or an incompatibility with her world view? The moral sense of a snake coupled with the unforgiving judgment of a Puritan preacher? The sociopathic detachment with which she scanned for personal weakness and the elegance with which she struck? ("So you've been a bridesmaid? But never a bride.") The composure remains, but she has grown into it now. The preternatural element of her gifts-slash-unnameable threat has lessened. The family and viewer are less tense. It's a relief, but the laughs are fewer and our time together is over. It was great while it lasted though.

For a show based on sarcastic back-chat, this last-ever episode turns the tables with a Disney-style finale. Karen's even offering tea and biscuits when dodgy Auntie Angela (Samantha Bond) turns up with her latest toy boy. But how will Spartacus: The Musical go for Ben? And what about the search for Tommy the hamster? Claire Skinner, Hugh Dennis and the kids - Tyger Drew-Honey, Daniel Roche, Ramona Marquez - make a surprisingly sentimental exit.

We've been dreading this day, the day when we finally have to cut the apron strings and let go of the kids from Outnumbered. Sorry, we thought we'd be able to stay strong but it's just too... *dabs eyes with hankie*

Yes, after five series, the show's child stars Tyger Drew-Honey (Jake), Daniel Roche (Ben) and Ramona Marquez (Karen) are starting to dwarf their on-screen parents Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner, meaning it's time to bring the beloved BBC sitcom to an end. In this final episode, Auntie Angela (Samantha Bond) returns to show off her latest toy boy, there's a cringeworthy performance of the school play, Spartacus: The Musical, and, most shockingly of all, there are signs that the Brockman kids might actually have turned out... alright?!

Video: Punt and Dennis on making 'news' funny

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis have reformed to produce a touring show called Ploughing on Regardless as well as their regular radio show.

One of the biggest problems with TV sitcoms centring on families is what to do when the child actors get older. This is particularly problematic with a show like Outnumbered, which returned for a fifth and final series this week, primarily because the comedy relied on the innocence and naivety of the kids. Almost seven years on, the children are looking incredibly old most noticeably Ramona Marquez who started playing Karen when she was only five. Now twelve years old, Marquez's Karen was the centre of the action this week as parents Pete (Hugh Dennis) and Sue (Claire Skinner) worried that she was fitting in at her new challenging school. To an extent I feel that writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have updated the character well as she has now entered her stroppy pre-teen phase. She is a lot sulkier and I was shocked when I actually heard a swear word come out of her mouth. The school that Karen has been sent to has a very strict dress code and Karen is finding some of the work incredibly hard. She's also not fitting in all that well, as we see when she is forced to spend time with her one of her classmates after school. Karen's problems at school lead the ever-worried Sue to send out a late night e-mail to the parents of her daughter's classmates asking if they've had similar problems. The responses she receives are fairly shocking, prompting Pete to tell her that sending any e-mails after 11pm is a bad mistake. Whilst Karen's problems at school ring true, I was less interested in her search for a missing hamster. It just seemed to me like this story was something that Karen would've done while she's younger and I fail to believe that this new sulky brunette girl would be that bothered about a pet.

Elsewhere Karen's two brothers are more ill-served by the storylines especially Ben (Daniel Roche) who is auditioning for the school play. The character of Ben was great when he was a destructive young lad but as a teenager he seems to be a little lost. Though the thought of him playing the lead in a musical version of Spartacus did raise a few chuckles, this was the least realistic of the three plots. I did feel that there was more truth in the antics of older son Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey) who this week got a dodgy tattoo. This was a rite-of-passage story that a lot of teenagers have experienced and the fact that Jake wanted to remove the body art by the end of the episode was also incredibly realistic. Indeed, one thing that Hamilton and Jenkin have always excelled at is making their comedy feel as believable as possible. That's why Outnumbered worked so well when it started and why, for the most part, it still survives in 2014. Jake and Karen's story suited their progression and Pete and Sue continued to be the stereotypical fretting parents. The main thing I found about this series of Outnumbered, as compared to previous outings, is that I didn't laugh as much. While there were a few chuckles and a couple of titters I mostly felt that the comedy was well-observed but didn't find it funny enough to laugh out loud. Despite this I still found a lot to like about Outnumbered and feel that the chemistry between the five actors is still as fine as it was seven years ago. My only hope is that the Brockman family is given a fitting send-off and Outnumbered gets a suitably anarchic final series.

Pete (Hugh Dennis) is in helpline hell. He's got a bill in his handthat he can't pay because it's for £0.00. The person on the other end of the line is insisting he has to pay it though, because the computer says so. I don't think they would do that. You can't pay £0.00. I've just tried, and my computer says it has to be a sum between £0.01 and £99,999.99.

There are other things in this first episode of Outnumbered (BBC One) that don't ring true to me. Such as Frank Pringle's son having been offered drugs at school by his RE teacher (trying to be a bit edgy there, is it, a bit Bad Education?). Or the email firestorm that goes pinging off at quarter past midnight from the parents of Karen's classmates. Wouldn't happen.

What does it matter? Well, maybe it doesn't. It certainly wouldn't matter if Outnumbered was wildly imaginative or anarchic or surreal or anything like that (if only!). But my (admittedly unscientific) research suggests the people who like Outnumbered are the sort of smug metropolitan middle-class Farrow & Ball families who watch it and go: "Look, it's us, our Caspar slams the door too, hahaha!" I think that's what it's trying to do, it's about recognition. So it should ring true.

I'm not a fan, can you tell? If I wanted to watch families like this I could just go round and watch them, in the flesh. I do, in fact; they're my friends, my own family too if I'm honest. But I like my friends and family more than I like the Brockmans. I have to.

I really don't like the Brockmans. Pete and Sue (Claire Skinner - brilliant actor but not brilliant comic actor) are moany, bickery ditherers, constantly worrying about their dull mediocre problems. The children are simply horrid. Actually, they're hardly children any more; suddenly they're enormous, but that doesn't make them any better, just enormously horrid. Giant parasite children feeding off their own pathetic parents.

It would be OK if they were amusingly or at least entertainingly awful. But they're not, they're tiresome. As are their problems - the usual school issues, a frowned-on tattoo, a lost hamster. Perhaps the hamster is lost inside Pete, a sex game gone wrong? No such luck I'm afraid, that would be way too much fun. The hamster may be under the floorboards, it's probably just gone.

Radio Times review

It's now possible to measure the passage of time not just by how your own children have grown up but by the way the Outnumbered kids have changed. And it's frightening.

Little Karen has started secondary school and is almost unrecognisable with her dark, swishy hairstyle, while 14-year-old Ben is much bigger than older brother Jake, who's got a tattoo, sideburns and is learning to drive. Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner look exactly the same, though.

It's gently entertaining but somehow the cheeky dialogue that made us laugh when delivered by cute yet precocious children back in 2007 doesn't sound so funny coming from teenagers.