Jessica Hynes

From Monty Python and The Holy Grail to Blackadder, it's long been established that one of the underlying rules of historical comedy is to subvert the period setting with knowingly incongruous nods to the present day. Which is all well and good when employed as part of a wider comic arsenal, but cheap and wearying when overdone.

Unfortunately, that's the fatal undoing of Jessica Hynes' Edwardian-era sitcom Up The Women, which drills away at the supposedly hilarious spectacle of characters from the past failing to comprehend things we now take for granted.

Thus we have Adrian Scarborough's hapless caretaker getting into a pickle over the installation of a light bulb, and Rebecca Front's bullying snob sniffily dismissing electricity as a fad that'll never catch on. These moments, I should point out, are clearly regarded by Hynes and her five co-writers as rib-tickling conceits of massive comic import. Given that Hynes is a fine actress and co-writer of fondly regarded sitcom Spaced, the unrelenting weakness of her latest effort is hugely disappointing. It's not unreasonable to expect more from one of Britain's foremost comedy performers.

The only truly notable aspect of Up The Women is that it's a traditional studio-bound sitcom accompanied by a live laughter track, an ancient form new to "high-brow" BBC 4. But that presents its own problems; you can clearly hear the underwhelmed audience almost willing themselves to laugh as gag after gag falls flat.

Lines such as "I've had to swaddle mother again, and she really does put up quite a fight" and "Does your husband know you're cavorting with skirted anarchists?" have the rhythmic cadence of funny dialogue, but they're not actually witty in themselves. A sense of embarrassingly forced whimsy hangs over its attempts to revel in florid language à la Blackadder. But Hynes and co aren't in the same league as Curtis and Elton at their peak.

The characters speak in a combination of BBC Edwardiana and anachronistic contemporary argot, which, if one were feeling charitable, could be regarded as a parody of Andrew Davies' penchant for dropping contemporary terms into his period dramas. But the paucity of wit on display means it's all for naught.

Hynes plays a timid yet worldly-wise idealist whose belief in the suffragette movement throws her into sharp conflict with Front's stubbornly immovable conservative. And that's about it. All concerned - including an almost unrecognisable Vicki Pepperdine from Getting On as a daffy, buck-toothed housekeeper - deliver game performances, but no amount of gusto can compensate for such poor material. Having wasted such a fine cast, Up The Women merely wanders along to unremarkable effect.

Even taking into account the inherent difficulties of introducing a brand new sitcom over the course of 30 minutes, this lifeless groaner has to be regarded as a failure.

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Made by Steve Coogan's Baby Cow stable, Common Ground is a collection of ten 15-minute comedy shorts, each set in a neighbourhood in south London. Having featured Simon Day, Amelia Bullmore, Jessica Hynes and Charles Dance in previous weeks, the series concludes with Barry - based around Alex Lowe's octogenarian little Englander character which he honed by calling in to Iain Lee's LBC programme in the mid-2000s. With his wife having run off with a retired financial advisor, Barry embarks on a bucket list with his grandson.

It may not be earth-shatteringly original, but it's worth it just to hear Barry's view on pink candy floss: 'It's like eating Barbara Cartland's minge.' A (fictional) former member of So Solid Crew takes over a church choir in the far-funnier Nell, Ted and Marlon. It quickly descends into a creepy love triangle (with One Foot In the Grave actress Annette Crosbie occasionally chiming in with some unexpected filth); the humour is sharp, surreal and pleasantly wicked in places.

Jessica Hynes guest stars as the impecunious and frightfully rude Lady Littlewood, who turns up at Blandings with her obnoxious son. She is in dire need of a rich husband so she fixes her beady eye on half-witted Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall). He's far from being marriage material; apart from being a pig-obsessed idiot, he can't even remember her name.

It's the last in the comedy drama series that hasn't gone down well with Wodehouse fans. Still, with audiences of more than four million, Blandings obviously meets a need for some early-evening Sunday silliness.

This series based on the PG Wodehouse stories rolls to a close with house guest Lady Littlewood (Jessica Hynes) in suspiciously hot pursuit of Timothy Spall's borderline-amnesiac Earl of Emsworth. It's about as close to actual intrigue as this slice of inter-war frippery has got, relying as it does on stock storylines and stubbornly recurring themes (a prominent one being the digestive trials and tribulations of the Empress, the Earl's pet pig).

Guy Andrews's adaptations didn't need to be so straight forward and predictable - there's an awful lot of original Blandings material to mine and the show could have been denser than Lord Emsworth himself. But the advantage of the undemanding plot is the space it allows to wallow in the characters' gloriously ad hoc idiom: the endless variations on his suitor's name as misremembered by Emsworth, the way his son Freddie describes himself in his half-cut state as being 'tight as an owl', and the impending threat of the Empress morphing into 'tragic sausages' on the breakfast table.

The casting may be more eccentric than the storylines but there's a jolliness to these adaptations by Guy Andrews, from the stories of PG Wodehouse. Tonight's concluding tale sees the household at Blandings Castle take drastic action when befuddled Lord Emsworth (Timothy Spall) falls under the spell of a gold-digging marchioness (Jessica Hynes). Meanwhile, dipsomaniac heir Freddie (Jack Farthing) has sworn off women altogether - until he meets the Amazonian beauty drafted in to de-gas the Empress.

Little Crackers has been a highlight at recent Christmases and I was hoping for more of the same from Common Ground, another batch of short films with a humourous edge. But both Floyd, with Charles Dance as an ageing rocker, and Patricia, which had Jessica Hynes as a Tory politician, felt like jokes where no one hadf thought up a punchline. Small doesn't always mean perfectly formed.

Radio Times review

Sky's Little Crackers are something to look forward to each Christmas, and this series of shorts, all supposedly set in the same part of south London, has a similar feel. First, Charles Dance plays Floyd, an ageing rocker living with his uptight daughter. From a promising beginning - Floyd describing the death of Mama Cass to a class of primary school-children - it descends into cliché. Much better is Jessica Hynes's offbeat tale of quirky Tory councillor Patricia David. With a shock of wild, blonde hair, Hynes is virtually unrecognisable - though you may detect a touch of Boris Johnson about her portrayal.

Cast in the mould of Sky1's excellent Little Crackers, this series offers ten diverting snapshots of south London life. In the opening double bill, Charles Dance stars as an old rocker now living with his uptight daughter (Amelia Bullmore) and running up steep electricity bills growing his 'herbs' indoors. Following on Dance's heels is Jessica Hynes as a clueless politician, complete with Boris Johnson hairdo, whose luck never seems to run out.