Hugo Blick

This gem from last year was executive produced by Hugo Blick, the man behind BBC2's mighty thriller The Shadow Line. However, if you come to Roger and Val expecting dark violence and crushing suspense, you'll be terribly disappointed. It's more like Blick's previous series Marion & Geoff or Sensitive Skin, a muted, micro-observed domestic drama that has enough funny and absurd moments to qualify as sitcom, even if that tag feels all wrong. Alfred Molina and Dawn French are superb as a devoted but prickly married couple with a tragedy in their past that only emerges via hints over the course of the series. The plotting is understated, to put it mildly (tonight's opener is taken up with hunting for the guarantee for a broken vacuum cleaner), but also sweet, funny and very sad. If you missed it first time round, record the whole series - you won't regret it.

Roger and Val: Beyond the Curtain Hooks

"It can't just be about curtain hooks. What do they slam the door against and what's already in the house that they can't escape?" This was the question posed to [co-writer] Emma and me in the first meeting with our then-potential script editor, Hugo Blick - the genius behind such works as Marion & Geoff, Up In Town and Sensitive Skin.

Tonight Roger and Val have a row. But being the characters they are, it's a slightly hopeless and unimpressive row about fish fingers, and it leaves them wishing they had more glamorous rows, as they imagine their friends do. It's hard to think of another sitcom covering this kind of territory (the episode is subtitled 'The Unglamorous Row'). In its muted character comedy Roger and Val recalls other works from Hugo Blick (the executive producer here) such as Sensitive Skin (with Joanna Lumley) and Marion and Geoff (with Rob Brydon). The laughs come from minutiae, in this case the trivial details of the way two long-married, idiosyncratic characters interact, biting off the ends of their own sentences when they're cross, stirring a teaspoon with aggressive intent or lying about something minor just to score a point. As slightly pompous, easily riled Roger, Alfred Molina is wonderful, his every mannerism believable. If he doesn't remind you of someone you know, count yourself lucky. And if, gentlemen of a certain age, he reminds you of yourself at all, you're probably not alone.

In a world of gags and instant gratification, Roger and Val is a bold comedy commission. Even more so when one considers the action (such as it is) is restricted to one set and a middle-aged couple: Alfred Molina (as botanist and class warrior Roger) and Dawn French (long-suffering teacher Val).

In tonight's opener, the hunt for the guarantee slip leads to the exhumation of the Big Drawer and with it, a trove of hazy memories and vague regrets.

The watchword is realism and the script is well up to the mark, subtly and sympathetically reflecting the minutiae of marriage. If anything, it's almost too acutely observed: conversations meander all too authentically and French occasionally hams to fill the dead air. But Molina is wonderful and there's real chemistry between the leads. The hand of exec producer Hugo Blick (Marion & Geoff) also looms large, and with it the hope that this series holds handsome rewards for the patient.