John Sessions

Paul Ritter stars as frustrated thesp Jimmy Perry, while Richard Dormer is David Croft, a jaded comedy producer feeling pushed out by the BBC. When Perry comes to Croft with his script for a sitcom tentatively titled The Fighting Tigers, the two men begin a battle against "the enemy within" to get it made by the BBC. The dialogue may be on the broad side, but the acting and direction are splendid. Ritter and Dormer are grippingly good, while John Sessions makes for an astonishing Arthur Lowe.

Review: We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story

Jewel in the crown is John Sessions, so unrecognisable as Arthur Lowe you'd think they'd somehow defrosted the Captain Mainwaring star from suspended animation.

John Sessions blasts BBC 'management culture'

Actor and comedian John Sessions has criticised BBC "management culture" as "completely out of hand".

Stella Street box set review

Phil Cornwell and John Sessions play the cornershop owners Jagger and Richards - plus Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, David Bowie and many, many more - in this hilarious, heartwarming mockumentary.

Opinion: comedians & UKIP

I was intrigued, surprised and generally horrified to read that John Sessions is a UKIP supporter.

John Sessions, comedy pioneer: 'I lost my way'

He was the king of improv comedy. Now he's playing second fiddle to a dancing dog. What happened? John Sessions talks about stage fright, voting Ukip and life after the 'twinkly years'.

Radio Times review

Art for money's sake drives the farce forward in the penultimate episode of the upper-crust comedy. The choleric Lord Hannibal Didcot, played with a deep and convincing signature growl by John Sessions, thinks the canvas of a roly-poly popsie he bought from Clarence is a fake, and he wants his money back. His rumbles fall on deaf ears, since Clarence is busy posing with the Empress for a visiting American artist, Vanessa Polk (Daisy Beaumont), and Freddie is trying to shift a painting of a horse.

If the regular cast look just slightly bored in their gilded Wodehousian cage, Julian Rhind-Tutt brings proceedings to life. His return as the rakish Galahad, with his lightly devilled schemes and willingness to educate Freddie in the ways of the heart, is as welcome as any visitor to the great house could be.

David Walliams to voice BGT dog Pudsey in movie

The 42-year-old BGT judge has signed up alongside owner Ashleigh Butler and Scottish actor John Sessions, who will play a baddie.

"It is the autumn of 1922, give or take a year or two," rolls out the upper-class, Noël Coward-esque voice of the unnamed narrator of this six-part comedy drama. Cut to Vera Sackcloth-Vest (played with crazed gusto by the fabulous Miriam Margolyes), writer, gardener and transvestite, who is struggling with her staff at Sizzlinghurst Castle. Why do they insist on calling her madam instead of sir? Country life in Kent is so tedious and Vera longs for some excitement. What she needs is to elope with a lover, but first she had better run this past her devoted husband, Henry.

Writer Sue Limb echoes the literary styles of the Bloomsbury Set with pin-point accuracy. Our introduction to Ginny Fox (a brilliantly perceptive, if rather cruel, take on Virginia Woolf, portrayed with obvious relish by Alison Steadman) has the introspective writer staring at a crack in the ceiling for hours and being reminded of her love for Sackcloth-Vest.

How long it will be before these two can escape the drudgeries of normal life (in vast country estates!) and elope with one another is the subject of this opening episode. The writing and acting are both faultless and the series cast includes other great comic names such as Morwenna Banks, Nigel Planer and John Sessions, who crops up as saucy novelist DH Lollipop in future weeks.

This is a real Bohemian rhapsody - and I bet it moves to TV!

I never feel comfortable when fact is mixed with fiction. I spend the whole time trying to figure out what's real and what's made up and usually end up vaguely irritated if it's not clear which is which. And then, I usually say to myself, the truth is usually more interesting anyway, so why bother?

I had high hopes that Believe It!, the purported autobiography of the actor Richard Wilson, written by Jon Canter, might up-end my preconceptions. The programme felt a bit like an episode of The Unbelievable Truth, picking out factual nuggets from the welter of fiction: was he mates with George Best? Was his first acting role in Oh! What a Lovely War!, during the shooting of which he drove an apparently legless Lord Olivier back home to Brighton? And what about Mad Great-Uncle Hamish?

There were some good lines (I liked Hamish's advice - "never trust a man who doesn't drink, for he's walking around with truths inside him that he never lets oot"), and I laughed more than is usual with Radio 4 comedy. But I was troubled: the bit about him studying electrical engineering, for example, sounded true, though it seems his pre-thespian career was spent as a lab technician. But unless there's a killer joke in there somewhere, which there wasn't, why make it up?

As for Hamish (wonderfully played in the dramatised bits by John Sessions), I'm guessing he's not real, but I found myself wishing he'd existed. As he told the young Richard (played by David Tennant): "Do you want to have an exciting life and forget most of it or a blameless life and remember every second?"