Jack Seale

Radio Times review

The No 9 we visit this week is the flat of Tom (Reece Shearsmith), a primary school teacher whose disdain for hard work contrasts with his sunny, beautiful girlfriend Gerri (Gemma Arterton) and her efforts to make it as an actress. Tom keeps peeking scornfully out of the window at a homeless man in the street, until circumstance brings the vagrant, Migg (Steve Pemberton), into the flat while Gerri's away on a job. The gimmick of the show is that we never leave No 9, and maybe the persuasive Migg won't, either.

By halfway you'll have confidently announced where it's going, but Shearsmith and Pemberton give their story of how we're all one slip away from the gutter a chilling sense of rising dread. Nobody plays wicked games with the audience more skilfully.

Radio Times review

Dolly Wells and Emily Mortimer really are best pals, a relationship they cruelly twist as they play themselves in a naturalistic comedy of subtle embarrassment and unspoken resentment. You know you're in good hands when the opening minute sets up the premise with ruthless economy: a swift montage tells us that Dolly's split from her boyfriend and invited herself to LA, where Emily's shooting her biggest movie yet. Their fatal error is to agree that Dolly work as Emily's assistant, a power imbalance that puts a fleck of poison in all their conversations.

Improvising in front of intimate hand-held cameras, Wells and Mortimer make every barb and glance scarily convincing. You might not laugh much, but it's thrilling to see a comedy that knows what it's doing so precisely, so quickly.

Radio Times review

Businesses are booming in Pontyberry. Brenda's Buses has the luxury of choosing whether to take the local pensioners to the retail outlet on the A470, or the special needs children to Castle Cook. Inevitably, Aunty Brenda wins out. "I think we should take a leaf out of Whitney Houston's book - God rest her tortured, bloated, drug-addled soul. It's the children are the whatcha-call."

And now Simpsons Funeral Services has camp whirlwind Gwyn (Robert Evans, who scripts this episode) to help deal with the stiff backlog, its glamorous relaunch can't fail. That is, unless they let Gwyn make a promotional video.

Meanwhile Stella, driven to horny distraction by her hormone replacement treatment, offers an olive branch to grumpy neighbour Michael and is soon sharing wine and walking in on him in the shower. Told you.

Radio Times review

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are superb comic actors and ace gag-writers, but what makes them precious is their willingness to attempt difficult concepts, because they know that if it works they'll have something really special.

Last week we spent half the episode inside a wardrobe; this one-off story roams around the house of the week, a glass-walled millionaire mansion. Denis Lawson is at home, arguing with his wife (Oona Chaplin) and oblivious to the presence of two inept cat-burglars (Shearsmith and Pemberton). As they try to steal from him, there are near misses, pratfalls, murder and farce, all beautifully choreographed. But no dialogue.

Radio Times review

It's a canny move, placing Stella's new antagonist Michael (Patrick Baladi) in the house next to hers. With Aunty Brenda and her new brood just across the road, not to mention those weird people with the donkey, the street's crowded with people and the farce is stronger. Tonight, delinquent young smoker Ben has a surprise when he breaks into Michael's place. Note to househunters: look in the attic to check half the party wall isn't missing.

Meanwhile, Brenda and Dai Davies hold open auditions for coach drivers, using a mop and a child's plastic steering wheel; the glut of corpses at the funeral parlour reaches bursting point; and Big Alan picks up the minicab fare from hell.

Radio Times review

Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith return. If their last macabre comedy drama, Psychoville, was slightly weighed down by servicing a tricky overarching storyline, there's no such problem here since this is a series of one-offs, set in a variety of homes that all happen to be number nine on their street.

The opener is confined not just to a house, but to one room in a fusty old family mansion. And mostly, we're in the wardrobe: two grown-up siblings who used to live here (Pemberton and Katherine Parkinson) are celebrating her engagement with a party - and a game of sardines. As more guests squeeze in, everyone gets less and less comfortable, until the bickering turns to bile.

It's a vicious little one-act, one-room play, deftly staged and superbly acted by a cast that also includes Anne Reid, Anna Chancellor, Timothy West and Tim Key.

Radio Times review

After some necessary spadework last week to set up the new series, now creator/star Ruth Jones pens one of the show's funniest ever episodes. Every scene brims with jokes, malapropisms ("Your dad is as strong as an egg!"), hilarious images and fruity phrasing. Aunty Brenda is in particularly searing form, struggling with her hippy daughter ("Me and 'er father split up when she was ten - she's been a road accident ever since"), questioning the integrity of the scales at Blubber Busters, and holding tense, tough negotiations with Dai about the launch of their new coach-hire company. Dai Davies, not Dai Cosh.

There's new blood, too: Sherlock star Yasmine Akram joins the cast as Jagadeesh and Tanisha's plain-speaking niece, while Jonathan Ross appears as himself in one of Stella's HRT-fuelled sex dreams.

Radio Times review

This is the one the fans have been waiting for. It's the festival of Nacken so, ignoring Arbiter Maven's edict to take their Nightly Bye pill and sleep in peace, the residents hit the Moosic Tavern for a Dionysian all-nighter.

Inspired by Sky's smart decision to package up all the songs from series one into a music special two years ago, creators Chris Bran and Justin Chubb deliver a whole episode of catchy, weird sing-along folk. It's safe to say the pair, who write the series in a room full of musical instruments and switch constantly between script and song, own a copy of The Wicker Man.

Amid all the strange duos played by Bran and Chubb is guest star Rob Brydon as the beefy, Springsteen-esque Rex Camalbeeter. His song Female Badger will stay in your head for a week.

Radio Times review

Back into the light embrace of Pontyberry for a third series of Ruth Jones's comedy drama, which always manages to be comforting and inoffensive without being twee.

Stella (Jones herself) has long since moved on from the series two finale, when she said goodbye to the love of her life, Rob, because even he couldn't compete with her home town in the valleys and the people who live there.

Now she's training to be a nurse under a brisk sergeant-major of an instructor, and repeatedly arguing with a haughty new posh bloke she'll obviously end up sleeping with.

Emma applies for a job as a hairdresser, Aunty Bren's long-lost daughter returns, and Alan is told Little Alan must go on a diet. Basically nothing much happens, and it's delightful.

Radio Times review

Eileen Atkins is this episode's celebrity guest, playing the head of a girls' finishing school that Arbiter Maven (Justin Chubb) wants to infiltrate, so he can get one of their nice silver pendants. Before long he and Sporall (Chris Bran) are in party dresses and pigtails, learning how to work a fringed umbrella - but the school has a dark and silly secret.

As usual, the irrelevant songs and sketches provide the biggest laughs: a sung obituary for the victims of a bad quiche, an ad for psychotropic chewing gum, and folk singer Melody Lane with the plaintive ballad I Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really.