Jack Seale

Radio Times review

We have to end on a birth or a wedding. The birth was a few weeks ago, so Luke and Zoe's wedding it is. After the arguments about how big the party will be - everyone round at Stella's, bring a plate of food, and no, Daddy Simpson will not be dressed as a bullfighter - it's time for the stag and hen dos, with the lads' standard lager and curry effort blown away by the ladies, for whom hippie Verv has made some special cakes.

There are many laughs lurking behind the main business of the episode, which is whether Michael will make a huge error and leave our Stella behind. We know where it's going, but the journey has the right balance of sweet and bitter.

Stella's been recommissioned for a Christmas special and a fourth series. That's one of the easiest decisions any channel boss will take this year.

Radio Times review

This episode is almost more comedy soap than comedy drama, as young Katie has a serious accident. Her warring parents, plus Stella as an awkward third wheel, maintain a bedside vigil. As Stella wonders how solid her whirlwind romance with Michael is, Ruth Jones proves herself to be too good a writer and actor to let this dip into melodrama. Let's hope their relationship survives, so we can have more scenes like the hilarious one where Michael talks dirty in Valleys slang.

Meanwhile, Big Alan starts planning how to spend inheritance money he might never receive, and Emma becomes another member of the Morris clan whose fairy-tale relationship hits hard against reality. The apple doesn't fall far from the whatchacall, is it?

Radio Times review

You can lose yourself pleasurably for an hour even in the less eventful episodes of this series, so an incident-packed one like this one is truly a treat. The story of Big Alan's hitherto unmentioned brother and mother, the latter of whom has died, might be in poor taste on less whole-hearted shows: it turns out Mam was an even more imposing physical presence than Big Alan, which causes logistical problems at the funeral.

While Big Alan's coping with that - and with the reappearance of his estranged brother, Alan - the aftermath of the car-lot robbery is just one reason why Stella is falling out with all three of her children, a crisis that brings her and Michael closer together.

Radio Times review

The last and nastiest visit to the ninth house on the left, which this episode is a looming, draughty pile out of place on a suburban street. Aimeé-Ffion Edwards, as excellent here as she was in Skin and Walking and Talking, is a schoolgirl babysitter who's been promised a bumper payday but immediately finds that the job, set by icy householder Helen McCrory, is too creepy to be worth the cash.

To say more would spoil, but as the creaking terror takes hold you'll marvel at how Steve Pemberton (absent) and Reece Shearsmith (in full Hammer horror mode) can pepper the elegant script with gags without breaking the spell.

Will there be a better comedy series in 2014? Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's twisted, and indeed twisty, tales are too dark for some viewers' blood, but they're the work of storytellers at the top of their game. Each self-contained episode slyly mixes silly jokes and proper horror. Start with the beautifully choreographed A Quiet Night In.

Radio Times review

Star and showrunner Ruth Jones wisely hands her scripting laptop to Steve Speirs, the actor who does such fine light comic work as Big Alan, for Big Alan's big episode. Yes, Alan's taken hostage by a militant pensioner on a bus trip to Bristol Zoo, but his main trial is convincing Celia to give him another chance after he bottled out of taking their relationship further.

Speirs writes himself a perfectly sweet and unpretentious scene, but doesn't stop there. Stella and Michael (Jones and Patrick Baladi) also have a series of lovely two-handers, while Emma rues her dalliance with her boss and young, silly Ben gets involved in a classic example of teenagers acting stupidly but all too believably.

Radio Times review

The biggest challenge Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have set themselves, with this anthology of one-off dark comedies, has been pouring a new story into the pint pot that is half an hour of TV. They manage it with panache here, in another fable of the unforeseeable that gallops unerringly to a horrible conclusion.

Pemberton is a boorish, bitter stage actor taking the lead in the Scottish Play. He's dismissive of his co-stars, the audience and particularly his meek understudy Jim (Shearsmith). But Jim's fiancée isn't willing to let her other half stay stuck in the wings...

It's a magnificent meta-Macbeth, full of daggers before and spots that damn. Knowing the text will take you only halfway and, in any case, the clever plot is really just a vehicle for characters sketched fully in only a few lines, and a torrent of fruity luvvie gags about jealousy, superstition and stage-hogging hams. Delicious.

Radio Times review

Not as many funny lines as usual in this episode, although Yasmine Akram is overplaying it nicely as Parvadi, the dangerously bored and randy assistant in her uncle's convenience store. Oh, and the rivalry between business partners Aunty Brenda and Dai Davies is becoming obsessively bitter, to the point where only murder or fiery sex can resolve the tension. Either would be scary.

Mainly, though, we're tracking the twin romances of Emma and Marcus, an unlikely workplace fling that's moving too quickly, and Stella and Michael. A lovely set piece sees her save him from embarrassment at a corporate do. The chemistry between Ruth Jones and Patrick Baladi, both unshowily nailing the subtleties of their characters, is a joy.

Radio Times review

Having set an unreachable standard in the previous two episodes, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton ease off a bit here, delivering a tale that's as brilliantly acted and constructed as you'd expect, with several sublime moments - but no knockout blow.

Tamsin Greig plays a friendly but efficient representative of a charity that makes wishes come true for terminally ill children. She brings an Enrique Iglesias-ish pop star to a suburban house. When the visit goes wrong, she and the dying girl's parents (Pemberton and Sophie Thompson) are tempted to take advantage. It's a slight, silly story that can't go anywhere and doesn't. Flawless execution rescues it.

Radio Times review

Ultimately there's a good reason this show is called Stella and not, I don't know, Greetings from Pontyberry or some such. The ensemble are like a family we love seeing once a week, but the heart of the show is always Ruth Jones's creation. Her hopes and feelings are ours.

So this series is easy and uplifting because this year's upward-looking, bright blonde Stella is on form. This week, she and next-door neighbour Michael (Patrick Baladi) move closer, a slow courtship we'll be content to watch unfurl. It starts when she slams his fingers in his car bonnet.

Tonight's comic set piece is a Brenda's Buses trip to a nightclub, featuring two celebrity cameos: X Factor/Big Brother star Rylan Clark, and his teeth.