Julia Davis

How the BBC turned down Hunderby

The BBC turned down the chance to make Hunderby, creator Julia Davis has revealed. And she had sack Alexander Armstrong from the key role of Doctor Foggerty, after she found a more suitable actor in Rufus Jones.

Latitude festival comedy review: The Bird

It's beautifully shot and produced. The film is dark, and sad in parts - in particular a shot of Julia Davis whistling flickeringly for the bird her desperate, deprived son has stamped out, teary mascara running down her face - but the sturdy roster of comedy talent behind the film ensure there are enough bleak laughs and grim smiles raised.

Julia Davis: silly, funny and deliciously twisted

The star of Nighty Night and Human Remains is one of the rare few in British comedy who has never put a foot wrong.

This Radio 4 comedy stretches the character-creating skills of Julia Davis and Mark Wootton to their limits, with the pair playing six different couples attending therapy sessions, trying to process problems ranging from "small mouths" to "sexy bread". Reminiscent of Davis's much-loved series Human Remains, Couples oozes eccentricity and playful innuendo.

Couples review - a parade of hysterical eccentrics

Surreal and disturbed meets goading and diabolical as Julia Davis and Marc Wootton play a series of couples in therapy.

Over on Sky Arts 1, some light relief from Psychobitches, one of the best new comedies on TV last year, though given its tiny home, few people actually got to see it. It's a sketch show set in a therapist's office, in which famous (dead) women from history tell psychiatrist Rebecca Front their troubles. The first series was a knockout - Julia Davis played a wailing hybrid of Pam Ayres and Sylvia Plath; the Brontë sisters were foul-mouthed, filthy puppets obsessed with sex, and Sharon Horgan played a campy Eva Peron, who clung on to her bottles of "boobles". It was silly, and odd, and very funny.

This second series is almost as good, though it feels more like a traditional sketch show and is slightly patchier, perhaps due to the sheer number of writers (I counted 12 on the credits for the first episode of this double bill, and seven on the second). In the best sketch, Kathy Burke and Reece Shearsmith play the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret as crude and grotesque, glugging down booze as Burke repeatedly rejects her on-screen offspring with delicious cruelty. Morgana Robinson joins the cast to play a sloppy Anna Nicole Smith - hers is a masterclass in physical comedy - and there's a musical skit featuring Unity, Decca and Nancy Mitford, as imagined by Horgan, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Ellis Bexter. In a sketch the Mail has already called "hideous", Michelle Gomez has gone from Doctor Who's Missy to an even more terrifying villain, playing Thatcher as a Hannibal Lecter-style monster, incapable of love. It's at its finest when it's upsetting the establishment, and it relishes its naughtiness.

The second episode was less sharp. Perhaps, given its hyperactive pace, it works better in single doses. But I loved Horgan as Carmen Miranda - "Of course I'm on fucking drugs" - and Sheridan Smith as a mute Sleeping Beauty, whose endless sleep has an ulterior motive. And anything that gets Kathy Burke back on our screens, even for a few minutes, is well worth our attention.

Nighty Night box set review

Would-be husband stealer Jill Tyrrell is a frankly terrible human being - and a brilliant comic creation by Julia Davis.