Kevin Bishop (I)

Preview - Porridge

If this show has one thing going for it, it's that the original writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, are still writing it, but they will never been able to fill the gap left by the late Ronnie Barker.

After last year's special, the reboot from Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais gets a full series. Kevin Bishop, eerily channelling Ronnie Barker's mannerisms, stars as hacker Nigel Fletcher, Norman Stanley's grandson. In an episode that makes you cautiously optimistic this may just work, we find Fletch, for a price, dispensing legal advice and writing letters on behalf of fellow inmates - which gets complicated when Fletch agrees to mediate in person with naive Barry's girlfriend.

Porridge: The Go-Between preview

The new Porridge certainly feels comfortable and familiar, but also does enough not to be a shameless counterfeit, even if it clearly exists in the shadow of its forebear.

Kevin Bishop's Porridge savaged by fans of the original

"Goldilocks would be havin' none of it."

Porridge reboot shows that past is best left alone

Watching the new Porridge is like visiting a favourite old café only to find that its best bits have been jettisoned: the tomato-shaped ketchup bottles have been replaced by sachets, the Formica tables by stripped pine. Sometimes the past is best left alone.

TV review: Porridge, BBC1

Over the weekend I posted a small preview of this new series on Facebook and very quickly got an unusually large number of comments. Let's put it this way. The only person who said something nice about the reboot of the regularly repeated classic prison sitcom was a mate of one of the cast.

When Kevin Bishop was sacked from Grange Hill

Actor and comedian Kevin Bishop has been appearing on Tracey Ullman's Show of late, and in 2016 we saw him star as Nigel Farage in Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back. But his big break came in 1994, when he was cast in the role of Sam Spalding in the gone-but-not-forgotten classic kids TV drama, Grange Hill. Bishop played the character across the 17th and 18th series of the show. Yet Sam Spalding mysteriously disappeared halfway through his second series. The reason? Kevin Bishop had been fired.

Tracey Ullman's Show review

Ullman throws herself at it with gusto and it's iconoclastic enough to elicit gasps as well as giggles.

Preview: Tracy Ullman's Show series 2

This week sees the return of Tracy Ullman's Show to BBC One, with the first episode airing on Friday 3rd February at 9:30pm. As with the first series, a bevy of TVO regulars are involved: this time around Dan Skinner, Tracy Ann Oberman, Lucy Montgomery and Laurence Rickard are part of the impressive ensemble cast. But is the end result worth a look? TVO editor Paul Holmes took a sneaky peek...