Judy Parfitt

Radio Times review

The prim Banbury suffragettes endeavour to "trek across the foothills of ignorance" and "ascend the slopes of injustice", inspired by real-life American mountaineer Annie Smith Peck. How? By distributing an uncompromising leaflet.

Once again, writer and leading lady Jessica Hynes proves mistress of the double entendre: cricket boxes, stiff whites, and fluids for her colossal new Kodak camera. Rebecca Front is delightfully withering as resolutely un-emancipated Helen, while Judy Parfitt is superb as worldly Myrtle. What's lacking are belly laughs; more often than not the gags are as gentle and mild as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage group's politics.

Radio Times review

The tiny band of women who make up the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage group think it's time to increase their number.

Gung-ho leader Margaret (Jessica Hynes, who created and co-writes Up the Women) has planned a rousing speech aimed at the village's downtrodden women workers. But none of them turns up to hear her rallying cry.

I can see that Up the Women's heart is in the right place, and it means well, but its few laughs are superficial and it feels underpowered. Still, the cast, notably the ever-splendid Judy Parfitt, a star of the memorable 1974 Suffragette drama Shoulder to Shoulder, here playing a mischievously lascivious aristo, has a high old time.

I'm unfamiliar with comedian Tom Wrigglesworth so wasn't quite sure what to expect of a routine based on telephone calls to his Sheffield-based family. But it's a lovely half-hour, with Tom becoming increasingly exasperated by his parents' failure to understand him and their obsession with the mundane.

Far from resenting them, he's actually extremely fond of the mum and dad who come out with batty lines like "I'm nostalgic for a twin-tub... oh, and your brother is in prison". And Tom's Gran is on the line too - to great comic effect: "Your mother is like the National Accident Helpline, always trying to compensate."

For me, the biggest pay-off was to discover she's played by one of our greatest actresses, the incomparable Judy Parfitt. She alone will make it worth tuning in for the rest of the series.

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.

Jessica Hynes's first full-series sitcom since Spaced could hardly be more different: old-fashioned, a little stagey and reminiscent of Dad's Army with its band of carefully characterised misfits playing a bit part in serious events of global significance.

Hynes is Margaret, leading a superb cast including Rebecca Front (whose embittered luddite conservative is a highlight), Vicki Pepperdine and Judy Parfitt as the ladies of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. The hot debate of the day (that day being in 1910) rapidly moves from tiffin provisions to whether or not to take up the suffragette cause after Margaret returns from London bursting with politely revolutionary zeal.

The performances are game (especially from Pepperdine, shelving any vanity rather magnificently), but the satire nibbles rather than bites; it's resolutely warm, gentle stuff, lacking a little polish and a big comic set-piece. Even so, it's a concept rich with potential and Hynes has more than earned our indulgence with her performance in Twenty Twelve.

Clive Coleman's six-parter Spending My Inheritance was clearly intended to address the impolite notion that 30 and 40-somethings are casting covetous eyes at their parents' final salary pensions and the sky is the limit value of their mortgage-free properties.

Somewhere between Coleman typing 'The end' and transmission of the first episode, the credit crunch storm blew in. So the idea of a senior member of the golf-playing classes and his wife releasing equity on their house for a grey pound-splurging spree while their debt and responsibility-ridden middle-aged son looks on in horror, seems merely fanciful.

Now, perhaps I'm jumping the gun here. So far, Brian and Liz (Kenneth Cranham and Judy Parfitt) haven't actually got round to the equity release, but they are showing a superhuman dedication to the good life and their son Harry (Kris Marshall) is tearing his hair out as he attempts to live up to the expectations created by their other, careerist, son. So maybe later on we'll find out if a bit of crunchy credit has been written into this scream of inter-generational angst.

In the meantime, Marshall jumps around jabbering so hyperactively as Harry that I can hardly blame his parents if they do go on a spend, spend, spend mission destined to leave him nothing. I can be laughed into submission over most things, but another five weeks of far from hilarious Harry might have me contemplating hara-kiri.