James Wood

Rev is over - but writer is working with Mat Baynton

It looks like Rev, the brilliant BBC2 comedy in which Tom Hollander played inner city vicar Adam Smallbone, is over. But fans will be pleased to learn that its writer James Wood is working on a BBC pilot with Mat Baynton.

This potentially final series has been brilliant. The last two episodes in particular, featuring Tom Hollander's Adam Smallborne's crisis of faith, have been truly spectacular. With Adam's resignation at the end of episode five, St Saviour's was demolished and the former vicar was now left looking for a new job.

James Wood's brilliant script perfectly demonstrated Adam's breakdown as he started to stay in bed all day and ignore the cries of his own daughter. In a lovely narrative twist we heard the thoughts of Alex (Olivia Coleman), Nigel (Miles Jupp) and Archdeacon Robert (Simon McBurney) as they all spoke to God; which is a plot device usually only saved for Adam.

Rev is one of those programmes that I wasn't instantly entranced by but I've grown to love over the years. This last series has been particularly brilliant and is a testament to all involved particularly Hollander, Wood and director Peter Cattaneo.

Does a sitcom actually need to make me laugh? That's the question I asked myself during the first episode of the third series of BBC Two's Rev. I certainly was glad to be given another opportunity to return to Saint Saviours and follow the exploits of the Reverend Adam Smallborne (Tom Hollander).

Once again Rev looks at the way that different people deal with faith by showing how many more people attend the local Mosque every week than come to Adam's church. James Wood's script is brilliant at combining this fairly deep subject matter with a light-handedness that makes it easy to like. Rev also excels due to its fantastically decent central characters Adam and Alex who are surrounded by a cavalcade of oddballs and mercenaries. Tom Hollander is brilliant in the lead role as he plays Adam as thoroughly down-to-Earth chap albeit one who constantly is worried about something or other. The brilliant Olivia Colman adds a bit of gravitas to her role of Alex whilst Simon McBurney and Miles Jupp continue to provide the laughs as Arch Deacon and Lay Preacher respectively.

As a fan of Getting On, I'm ecstatic that Scanlan and Pepperdine have joined the cast as a brilliant double act who may end up closing St. Saviour's. Even if the church does indeed close I hope that doesn't mean the end of what is brilliantly written and extremely well-acted series.

While it never makes me laugh out loud, Rev still provides plenty of good humour and that's sometimes all you need.

"I don't want a christening yet. I've already lost you to him." Thus Olivia Colman, with just that phrase, sets the entire tone for Rev, as she has quietly done for each of the past two series. By turns giggly, mournful, drunk, charming, ballsily defiant and utterly conflicted, she encapsulates pretty much this secular nation's attitude to 21st-century Christianity, which could be summed up in the title of a fine Douglas Adams novel (writing not about God but Earth itself): Mostly Harmless.

A triumphant return but, for a comedy, it's pretty strong gravy when you think about it, as you should. The fact that God is man's finest confection detracts not one whit from "his" essential confected goodness, and the palaces of myth serve, by and large, to do great good. Except when they get in the way of real life, or bore, or nag: and that's why Colman does such a tremendous job, refracting our every niggle with organised religion through the simple premise of being married to, and more pertinently in love with, a rev. So we share her increasing frustration at the fact that hubby, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander), has to open his door not just to waifs and strays but to borderline psychopaths: troubling enough when they were just the two, but the arrival of baby Katie is a delight that is slowly, delightfully, doing their nuts in.

It is also, I should have mentioned this, extremely funny. I don't think that Hollander or his co-writer James Wood have put much more than a tootsie wrong since the first series, but their writing in this latest outing becomes ever more deft, daring, even confrontational. The scene in which Mick, the splendidly grubby dreadlocked Jimmy Akingbola (carrying the most foetidly evil one-armed doll) offers to babysit, with the well-intentioned cackle: "You take your lady out for a nice night an' when you comes back, ta-da! She still alive!" mesmerised: and also spoke of poverty, race relations, child abuse and 10 other things which don't get a better outing in an entire hour of the increasing fractious Question Time. Adam/Tom's facial reaction to this charming offer was a brief masterclass in English politesse. And at his heart is not so much a crisis of faith but the full and faithful knowledge that God does not exist other than to provide the wages.

As far away from Derek Nimmo in All Gas and Gaiters, in generational terms, as it's possible to get, and hyperspace-removed from the Vicar of Dibley, as in it's funny: not only but very. And so wise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into what is, after all, a half-hour of light entertainment on a Monday night, but when I saw Adam/Tom - I cherish the believability of the character so much, they're interchangeable - standing in some yakhole of a playground pulling on an e-cigarette, he simply felt like every small man mulling over big thoughts, as opposed to every big man thinking small thoughts, ever. I don't have too much choice in the matter, but I know which one I'd rather be.

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In the final part of James Wood's and Rupert Walters' comedy-drama, the embassy is faced with a potential "Tazbek spring", along with a visit from the president's filthy rich pop-star daughter. The characters' arch observations about diplomatic life in central Asia suggest thorough research, but as arch observations about diplomatic life in central Asia aren't something most of us will howl in recognition at, the whole thing feels like a Mitchell and Webb sketch gone awry: an hour of groundwork-laying and no punchline.

Ambassadors is the low-key acerbic comedy drama set in a British embassy in the fictional central Asian country of Tazbekistan. The first episode had some tonal problems as it struggled to establish whether it wanted to be funny or clever, and often failed to achieve either.

But it was OK, and at times mildly amusing, which already put it out in front of most of the competition. That said, you expect better than occasionally mildly amusing from David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who maintained a level of demented brilliance in Peep Show for years.

And in the second episode they were indeed much better. Some of the improvement could be attributed to a wonderful turn by Tom Hollander as an obnoxious prince who stumbles luxuriously around the globe as a trade envoy creating international crises - a great comic idea, and one wonders who could possibly have been its inspiration.

More than that, though, it was a matter of characters falling into place and the place finding its character. Webb is oddly convincing as a cynical idealist assistant to the ambassador, and Mitchell shows a conflicted steeliness and sensitivity that goes some way beyond his stock gift for the florid rant.

The writing, by James Wood and Rupert Walters, was sharper too. Several plot strands were neatly combined, and there was an impressive resistance - as shown with the Prince Mark storyline - to succumbing to the obvious. Rather than bash you over the head with jokes, it takes a more diplomatic approach. And I don't care what Steve Coogan says about him, Mitchell has persuaded me on this one.