John O'Farrell

If anyone cares to run a "most irritating TV character of the year" competition I guarantee that Alice Chaplin will be near the top, if not the outright winner. Alice (a twitchy Shirley Henderson) is a middle-class mum who passes herself off as her own 11-year-old daughter to sit a posh public school's entrance exam. We are meant to feel a bit sorry for Alice, I think, because she's goaded to going to such ridiculous lengths by the other insufferably pushy and smug mums on her gated housing estate. But, blimey, she's annoying. And the bit where she dresses as a teenage girl in front of her very interested husband is just a wee bit creepy. Still, if you like jokes about the poorness of comprehensive schools and organic lollies and you enjoy seeing middle-class parents behaving like idiots, this adaptation of John O'Farrell's novel will be right up your suburban street.

This quirky two-part comedy-drama makes light of one of modern-day parenting's most common neuroses - namely, getting your kids into a decent school. Adapted from a novel by John O'Farrell, it stars Shirley Henderson and Darren Boyd as anxious parents Alice and David, rapidly caught up in this madness after moving with their three children into a leafy London suburb.

The situation becomes so crazy (extra tutoring, brain-food diets etc.) that when their 11-year-old daughter Molly looks as if she's blown her chances, Alice decides to take the most drastic step of all - by posing as the child and taking the entrance exam on her behalf.

John O'Farrell's novel, on which this is based, is a funny, endearing comedy about social pressures in the suburban middle classes. The television version is a highly irritating comedy drama about people that it's hard to like. Middle class mother Alice (Shirley Henderson) goes to the ludicrous lengths of dressing up as her 11 year-old daughter to sit an entrance exam for a school to make sure she gets into it. It doesn't help that Henderson has a habit of playing irritating characters in the first place, but really, this is one that should have been left as a novel where it was much more palatable.

Expect an arched eyebrow and plenty of sardonic quips as Sandi Toksvig reprises her role as literary quizmaster. Filmed at the Hay festival, this tongue-in-cheek series invites the likes of Rick Wakeman, Jan Ravens, John O'Farrell and Frank Skinner to test their know-how: whereupon Toksvig will separate the truly bookish from the blusterers. Also parading their Eng. Lit. credentials will be returning team captains Sue Perkins and Chris Addison.