Julia Davis

The Nick Mohammed three minute interview

Nick Mohammed plays Malcolm in E4's new series Drifters and has featured in a host of TV comedies including Miranda, Uncle, and Hank Zipzer alongside Henry Winkler. He is currently writing Morning Has Broken for Channel 4 with Julia Davis. Somehow he has also found the time to bring a new live show, Mr. Swallow - The Musical, to his year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Psychobitches (Sky Atlantic) finished its first series last night (following last year's pilot), and anyone who says television doesn't make inventive programmes any more should watch it.

Set in the office of a modern-day female psychiatrist, who is confronted by some of history's most famous, unusual or bonkers women, it is surreal, but gloriously different.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the idea was pitched. "We'll have Eva Braun going to see the psychiatrist, and Joan of Arc, of course... Funny? Yes, of course it'll be funny! I know - we'll have Mother Theresa too. Hilarious!"
And, unlikely as it might seem, it works.

The characterisations are as inspired as they are off-the-wall. Last night, Sam Spiro gave an hilarious rendition of Jackie Kennedy as a female version of Columbo the detective, and Zawe Ashton played a madly feline Eartha Kitt. Frances Barber's over-the-top version of Catherine the Great was annoying but Harry Enfield gave a brilliant impersonation of "Mrs Alfred Hitchcock" looking disturbingly like Mr Alfred Hitchcock dressed in women's clothes. And Julia Davis was beautifully ditzy as Mary Pickford, the silent film star. "That's seven times now," she complained to the psychiatrist, "that men have tied me to railway tracks..."

The scripts (by a team of writers) are clever, but the whole thing is held together by Rebecca Front, who plays the psychiatrist with a perfect mixture of assurance and bafflement. I know that Olivia Colman has been officially anointed as the nation's new favourite actress, but for my money Rebecca Front is up there. From The Day Today through Alan Partridge, The Thick of It and Lewis to Psychobitches, she is always excellent.

Despite the impeccable credentials of everyone involved (Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine), Up The Women just doesn't fly. For a start, there's no real point; any political edge is sidestepped or dampened by the air of farce. And the humour itself is limited to double entendre, sight gags and broad physical comedy. Why couldn't the BBC have just commissioned a full series of Hynes and Julia Davis's scabrous Lizzie and Sarah instead?

I've seen a few things in the Playhouse Presents series. A bit like going to slightly up-its-own-arse arty theatre (only with big name stars). In my house we've chortled loudly, not because we've thought something was funny but to show we've recognised it as a joke. And in the advert break we've rushed to the kitchen to down a couple of pre-poured and now warm glasses of white wine, after which the second half has been more bearable and passed faster.

Psychobitches, though, which piloted last year, flies past, and is genuinely hilarious. The idea - famous people from history visit a modern-day therapist - isn't entirely new, I don't think (perhaps you can think of the examples: I can't). But it's written, by a vast team of writers, with such originality and wit, imagination and cojones, that it feels like a whole blast of new. In my house at half-time, and again at the end, we were comparing, and reliving - and relaughing at - favourite bits and characters. A nightmarishly needy Audrey Hepburn; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford bitching and backstabbing and bashing each other over the head with their best actress Oscars (it manages to be both clever and silly, a very attractive combo); Margot Fonteyn being very very old; Jacqueline du Pré communicating only through her cello, expressing love, childhood, adultery, coriander (a mournful downwards glissando, perhaps to signify distaste, or wilting?).

My highlight is Julia Davis's Sylvia Plath, but a Sylvia Plath who deals with all her internal strife and angst by adopting the persona of fellow poetess ... Pam Ayres. Davis as Plath as Ayres: it's a mash-up from heaven. Sharon Horgan's delusional, egocentric, megalomaniacal Eva Peron is also a joy, sipping her boobles (champagne) and naming leedle seedies in Argentina after herself, who she refers to in the third person. And the puppet-sized Brontë sisters, coarse Yorkshire slags squabbling on the sofa, mainly about (not) losing their virginity. "It's not me who's the desperate one," Charlotte squawks to Emily. "I'm not the one gagging for it that much her fanny's frothing like a beck in a storm."

So many highlights in fact, and such great performances, from the aforementioned, and from Sam Spiro, Katy Brand, Frances Barber, Sarah Solemani, Zawe Ashton, Jo Scanlon and more. Not forgetting Rebecca Front, as the kind, deadpan, calm (mostly: Audrey pushes her), but also human and very subtly arch therapist. "What do you have?" she asks politely, after Nina Simone has soulfully wailed: "Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes, ain't got no money, ain't got no class ...". The answer? Depression of course.

They all seem to be having such a brilliant time doing it, it's impossible not to get swept along in the tide of fabulousness and sharp writing and cleverness-meets-silliness, with just a pinch of coriander lunacy. This is very funny women at their very funniest. Oh, plus one man, Mark Gatiss as Joan Crawford, also lovely.

Up The Women (BBC4) also [like Psychobitches]] has fine performances by funny women, including Rebecca Front, and Jessica Hynes, who wrote it too. Hynes is a favourite of mine. It was a travesty that her wonderful nightmare PR character in Twenty Twelve was beaten to the Bafta by Olivia Colman (it was also a travesty that the overrated Twenty Twelve got the comedy Bafta ahead of Hynes's mate Julia Davis's way-more-brilliant Hunderby ... God, this is just all the same names coming up over and over again). Fans of Spaced may disagree, but on the basis of this, she's a better comic performer than she is a comic writer. They are, after all, totally different skills; writers and actors tend to be very different people.

It's not bad, it's just a bit staid. The fact that it's centred on a non-typical sitcom subject (the suffragette movement) can't disguise that it is a rather ordinary, old-fashioned sitcom. The door opens, someone comes in, does a gag, cue studio audience laughter. There's less living-room audience laughter in my house, certainly a lot less than in Psychobitches.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Psychobitches, Sky Arts 1 new comedy series, is an all-female affair. It isn't, though nobody gets on screen without dragging up, the essential conceit being that the patient list for Rebecca Front's psychotherapist is composed entirely of famous women from history. Some of them have come to do some work on a family relationship, such as the Brontë sisters, bickering furiously in a row on the couch.

Others are working on more private problems, including Audrey Hepburn, who is having difficulty finding the fine line between being charming and infuriating. And it's very funny. As Hepburn, Samantha Spiro is terrific, winsomely inviting Front's weary therapist to play imaginary ping-pong. But Julia Davis is good too as Sylvia Plath, who excitedly confides that she's been experimenting with writing in a different persona: "Oh I wish I'd looked after me toes/ Not treated them like they were foes," she reads perkily, before black despair gradually edges out Pam Ayres.

The writing is often excellent - Charlotte Brontë's furious complaint that her oversexed sister is "frothing like a beck in a storm" seemed oddly plausible - and even the spaces between the sketches are drily funny (Jeremy Dyson directs). But it would be unfair not to give due credit to a performer who could easily get overlooked, since she's the foil and not the funny woman: Rebecca Front gets bigger laughs doing virtually nothing here than some of her co-stars do with a string of punchlines.

Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations.

Last night's opener of a five-part series (expertly directed by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson) started with Rosa Parks, not on the couch but "here for my appointment" in a glorious blink-and-you'll miss-it sight gag, where all the other women in the waiting room jumped up to offer her their seat. Actually being therapised, as it were, in the Sigmund Freud-style office, were (among others) an irritatingly winsome Audrey Hepburn (Sam Spiro), a grandiose Eva Peron (Sharon Horgan) and a self-obsessed Sylvia Plath (Julia Davis).

Plath was trying out a new writing persona in which she donned her grandmother's dress and wig and morphed into Pam Ayres - "I wish I'd looked after me toes/ Not treated them like they were foes" - one of many moments in this half-hour when I laughed out loud. It was an inspired gag. Equally good were the scenes involving the bickering Brontë sisters; Anne (Sarah Solemani) was meek but knowing, while Charlotte (Selina Griffiths) was withering about Emily (Katy Brand) needing to lose her virginity, or, as she put it in her broad Yorkshire vowels, "She should fuck off to Keighley on a Friday night and lose it to a cowhand and do us all a fucking favour."

Among the mix was Mark Gatiss and Frances Barber hamming it up marvellously as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, in full What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? mode, endlessly outdoing each other in the meanness stakes, while Rebecca Front's therapist - an unshowy part that could easily go unnoticed in this parade of misfits - was nicely pitched. There was the occasional miss, but overall this was a joy.

An amazing lineup of comic actors have a ball playing historical figures in therapy opposite Rebecca Front's ever-patient psychologist. Julia Davis puts a new twist on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Samantha Spiro is a ping-pong Audrey Hepburn, Mark Gatiss a superb Joan Crawford to Frances Barber's inspired Bette Davis. Katy Brand stars as one of three sweary Brontë sisters. It's the comedy equivalent of eating a lot of biscuits. If you miss it you will forgo the funniest thing on TV this year.