Jessica Hynes

The finger of suspicion points at the members of the fledgling suffragette craft circle after a naked statue in the village is vandalised in the name of equality. Writer and star Jessica Hynes always faced a struggle in recapturing the brilliance of her best work, but even so, this should be far more sparky and spirited. There's a nice gag on passing off shop-bought as home-made, but it's a sad state of affairs when even a riff on euphemisms for female genitals doesn't raise a guilty chuckle.

How many Edwardians does it take to change a light bulb? About eight if Up the Women is anything to go by, though as one of them said: "It's hard to see how this would replace the candle."

Jessica Hynes wrote in this newspaper last week that her three-part sitcom about a group of failed suffragettes was originally intended as a film. It says nothing too complimentary about our priorities that the project ended up as a BBC4 micro-budget three-parter, shot in front of a studio audience in a two-room set.

As it was, the traces of its film script origins were detectable in Hynes's performance as the clever but timid Margaret. She proposed that the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle revitalise itself as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage. Hynes appeared to be acting in the uplifting, thoughtful movie that you would never have quite got round to seeing at your local arthouse cinema. Oddly, though, she seemed to be surrounded by performances, from Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine et al, that were sketch-show broad.

The script, too, careered between these two registers. Still, the brilliant Pepperdine had some funny false teeth and mugged her way through a quite silly knob gag. That just about got my floating vote.

Up the Women has a great premise: a ladies' craft circle is politicised by Margaret (Jessica Hynes) into forming a group to "politely request women's suffrage". It also has a great cast, including Rebecca Front as a dissenting snob ("Does your husband know you were cavorting with skirted anarchists?") and Vicki Pepperdine as a simple-minded "old maid". All it lacked was a great first episode. There were some overdone historical gags (one about a lightbulb being a "ridiculous fad" seemed to last for several years), with suffragettes described as "mannish, flat-fronted, bottom-heavy spinsters".

Up the Women seemed undecided whether to aim for a suffrage-themed Dad's Army vibe, or Blackadder-style absurdist drollery, falling nervously in between. Saying that, first episodes are notoriously tricky, and there was more than enough to merit another peek. My favourite bit was Margaret's earnest, quavering, suffragette singsong that attempted to be rousing but ending up sounding as if somebody from Songs of Praise was being gently lowered into a well.

Up The Women (BBC4) also [like Psychobitches]] has fine performances by funny women, including Rebecca Front, and Jessica Hynes, who wrote it too. Hynes is a favourite of mine. It was a travesty that her wonderful nightmare PR character in Twenty Twelve was beaten to the Bafta by Olivia Colman (it was also a travesty that the overrated Twenty Twelve got the comedy Bafta ahead of Hynes's mate Julia Davis's way-more-brilliant Hunderby ... God, this is just all the same names coming up over and over again). Fans of Spaced may disagree, but on the basis of this, she's a better comic performer than she is a comic writer. They are, after all, totally different skills; writers and actors tend to be very different people.

It's not bad, it's just a bit staid. The fact that it's centred on a non-typical sitcom subject (the suffragette movement) can't disguise that it is a rather ordinary, old-fashioned sitcom. The door opens, someone comes in, does a gag, cue studio audience laughter. There's less living-room audience laughter in my house, certainly a lot less than in Psychobitches.

So where would Jessica Hynes go after her brilliant turn as the spectacularly ghastly PR Siobhan in Twenty Twelve?

The answer, rather surprisingly, is back in time, donning the high collars and sturdy skirts of suburban wife Margaret - a pillar of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle - in Up The Women (BBC4).

Except that Margaret has seen the light, a brush with suffragettes in London has opened her eyes to the Votes For Women cause. Now Margaret is determined to spread the word to her fellow stitching ladies.

However, in her way stands the indomitable Helen, a woman who likes the world just the way it is - because she's in charge - and who squashes the intellectually frustrated Margaret flat, telling her: 'I know it's hard for you to accept that you've read all those books for nothing.'

This could all come across as a quaint timepiece but Hynes, who writes as well as stars, cleverly draws parallels between life now and life a century ago, without hammering the point home.

Women still have a hard time being valued on intellect alone, just as they did in Edwardian times. Margaret is a woman for all ages.

Buoyed by some fine performances - Hynes and Rebecca Front locked in psychological battle as Margaret and Helen, Vicki Pepperdine brilliant (as ever) as a cake-baking frump, Judy Parfitt squeezing every last drop of libido out of a lusty granny - Up The Women is a comedy that sneaks up on you, ambushing with sly wit rather than attacking with laugh-out-loud gags.

It's not the finished article and this is just a tester three-part run.

But I'd vote for any comedy that has Margaret explaining why she hasn't told her husband about her new-found militancy thus: 'He's been very melancholic since Nietzsche's death - I thought it might tip him over the edge.' Beyond good and evil, rock on.

There was an unnerving moment in the first episode of Up the Women when it looked as if Jessica Hynes might have contracted a bad case of Eltonitis, an inflammation of the funny bone that can render even the most talented writers temporarily witless.

It occurred when Gwen unveiled the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle's new banner, revealing what appeared to be an embroidered border of rampant cocks. The ladies blinked, startled. "What's that?" someone asked. "Penis," replied Gwen. They blinked again. "Peonies," said Gwen, a little more clearly. "I've never seen one that big," someone else murmured. "Oh I have," said Mrs Von Heckling, whose comic trope is superannuated eroticism. Everything about the scene made the heart sink: the implausible misunderstanding, the coarseness, the comic cliché of the lubricious older woman.

Fortunately, it turned out to be completely (and inexplicably) unrepresentative, as if a different writer entirely had somehow tampered with the script and everybody involved was too embarrassed to point it out. Because elsewhere, Hynes pulls off the trick of writing an old-fashioned ensemble comedy very well indeed.

Her basic setting, a church hall that is the regular meeting place for the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle, summons memories of Dad's Army and there's something familiar too about the comic characterisation, as neatly differentiated as a box of crayons. There's a guileless one, a bossy one, a drab one and a resentful one. And then there's Margaret, newly inflamed with suffragette principles and trying to persuade the other members of the BICC to take up this dangerously radical cause.

Hynes has some easy fun with the past's silly inability to imagine the present. "Women in trousers! Driving motor cars! Is that what you want?" asks the scandalised Helen at one point, and Margaret reflexively winces in horror at the idea that she might be taken as such an extremist.

But those jokes are accompanied by lots of others that are more glancing and unexpected, and by the kind of comedy that isn't easily quotable - looks exchanged and things left unsaid. There's a nice running gag about Margaret's reflexive tendency to conceal her intelligence whenever a man enters the room, but the whole cast give off the confidence of actors who know precisely who and what they're meant to be, and so can polish their performance with something extra.

Rebecca Front stars in Up the Women, written by Jessica Hynes, who co-penned the rather brilliant Spaced (1999-2001) but who, strangely, has never received the same acclaim as her co-writer Simon Pegg.

Up the Women is traditional in its format - it's set mostly in one room, in this instance a village hall where the Bunbury Intricate Crafts Circle meet. It's 1910, and one of BICC's members, Margaret (Hynes) has been seduced by Suffragettism while on a day trip to London. The group's self-appointed bossy-boots leader Helen (Front), meanwhile, is having none of it when Margaret meekly suggests the group might support women's emancipation - "Women should not have the vote. We are simple, emotional creatures."

Margaret is a brainy woman who has long since accepted that women must always defer to men, even those markedly less intelligent, and a good running gag involved her explaining electricity to the overbearing caretaker (Adrian Scarborough), who was struggling to fit a new-fangled lightbulb.

The characters - particularly Vicki Pepperdine's toothy spinster - are drawn in broad strokes, and occasionally the humour (peonies being misheard for penis, for instance) is groaningly obvious. But there are some neat lines too, and superb acting from a fantastic cast who look like they're enjoying themselves, including Judy Parfitt doing a nice turn as Helen's decidedly naughty mother, Myrtle, sexually liberated long before the term was invented by the Pankhursts' spiritual daughters. Worth staying with.

Written by and starring Jessica Hynes, Up the Women is a gentle, charming sitcom set in 1910, and follows the transformation of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle into a branch of the suffragette movement.

Hynes plays the group's timidly radical leader Margaret, fiercely opposed by Rebecca Front's redoubtable matriarch Helen. "What on earth do women need a vote for?" Helen argues. "My husband votes for who I tell him to vote for. What could be a better system than that?"

The script is full of many fine lines, plus one excellent visual gag involving a tapestry of peonies, but it's all rather static, with the action - if action be the word - confined to a solitary village hall location and looking set to stay there.

However, the whole series is a mere three episodes long, so the chances of viewers developing cabin fever are minimal.

Jessica Hynes on her new sitcom Up The Women

"You think of Emily Davison as the only martyr, but it was all quite serious. It was no longer Carry On Up the Suffrage. I was crying into my tea..."