Marcia Warren

Which camp are you in - lover or loather? If the latter, you've probably already given up on Vicious, a show that's divided viewers and critics. But if you accept and revel in the fact that Stuart and Freddie are two gay men unabashed in their extravagant mannerisms and insults, which only the unimaginative would condemn as stereotypical, then enjoy because this series gets funnier, naughtier and, importantly, kinder to its characters.

Oddly, I'm now suffering from the delusion that Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi are in reality an item, have been for five decades, and this must be how they carry on in private.

Tonight, Ash invites his elderly chums to a nightclub in Soho. Actorly Freddie proves a big hit, but when a young woman makes a pass at Stuart, narcoleptic Penelope (Marcia Warren) comes out with four short words that almost stop the show.

I think I must be missing something. I thought comedies were supposed to be funny, to engage us in humour and laughter and make us smile. But Vicious did none of the above. In fact, I watched it rather stony-faced wondering whether I was missing the point. Had something just gone over my head?

Am I not witty/clever enough to "get" the jokes? Or was this sitcom starring two British acting legends - Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellan no less - just simply dreadful? Um, well, yes. It was the latter, I'm afraid.

From the outset, with its Communards title music, I felt like I was watching something I'd already seen. It felt so old and tired, it almost made me cross. Now I'm not normally a grumpy person (honestly I'm not) but a programme like this really irritates.

The two leads actors, who have played the likes of Gandalf, Magneto, Cadfael and Claudius between them, played Freddie and Stuart, a couple who have been together for 50 years and who were essentially two old drama queens, bickering and antagonising each other, while trying to flirt with their young neighbour Ash (Iwan Rheon).

There was awful lot of canned laughter involved (because I doubt a studio audience would have made any sound at all) and it would have been much better suited for the stage than the telly.

There was a high level of camp bitchiness with quips between the two leads and their supporting cast, Francis de la Tour and Marcia Warren, but it felt like McKellan and Jacobi were performing more to a half empty theatre than a prime time TV audience. Nothing was very believable and it all came across as a bit stupid, unnecessary and terribly cliched.

Laugh? Nope, not once.

Hearing Sir Ian McKellen gleefully call Sir Derek Jacobi "a cheating slut" is a joke we're not going to get tired of for ages.

And that's one of the less vicious insults being hurled about in episode two of our favourite new sitcom.

After their hilarious vampire-like horror last week at the curtains being opened, Freddie and Stuart actually venture out into daylight this week.

New neighbour Ash asks them for their advice about women, actor Freddie is excited about the Doctor Who fan club screening that he's about to attend (having been voted 10th favourite villain of all time) and Stuart is suspected of having an affair.

But truthfully, the plot scarcely matters when the dialogue is so delicious, the relationships so sharply drawn and the acting so sublime.

Frances de la Tour ("you remember our friend Violet") continues to drop by unannounced to purr throatily over Ash, but it's their other dotty friend Penelope (Marcia Warren) who delivers one of the lines of the night. Actually, make that the whole year.

Vicious, my type of television, is the panto-style tale of two heavily theatrical, caustic old homosexuals - Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi - living in a dark flat, curtains drawn, loathing everyone, with occasional visits from sublime proto-hag Violet - Frances de la Tour - who turns up to add deadpan fuel to their bitching bonfire. Broad, brash and shallow this may be, but if this isn't at least a rough outline of my life in the Starlight Home for Retired Hacks circa 2057, then something has gone very awry. I rather loved British stalwart Marcia Warren as Penelope, when the ensemble sat sipping tea at a gay wake, remembering their dead friend's terrific affection for handsome men. "Wasn't there a wife?" Penelope said, scrunching her face to remember the finer details of the 1960s, "I'm sure I remember a wife?" "Ugh, 17 years," McKellen hissed with an airy wave.

Most of the opening jaunt of Vicious featured the aged couple making colossal fools of themselves by flirting with their new twenty-something neighbour. If one really wants something to get terrifically het up about, one could say the whole show glorified sexual assault and augmented gay stereotypes. I just took it for a lovely, daft, gay, romp full of acidic quips. It's too beautifully easy and temporarily satisfying to detest all new comedy on sight. I do it myself.

The opening titles roll, the first scene appears establishing characters in broad strokes. "Ugh, I hate everyone here!" the internet roars, 'I hate the fact this was even made, I hate everyone involved, in fact this shit-fest is the amalgamation of all that is wrong, safe, depressing and nepotism-fuelled about British TV commissioning." Obviously, in the case of BBC1's The Wright Way, this is not only true but an understatement, but, in most cases, it's just a show gathering momentum.

I don't know who it is who makes up the studio audiences for sitcoms or what they're injected with before the recording begins, but, as Ben Elton's The Wright Way demonstrated last week, there is virtually nothing that they won't laugh at. Like laboratory animals trained to respond to some arbitrary stimulus, they react to anything that is even vaguely punch-line shaped. This turns out to be quite handy in Vicious, which is full of lines that have the cadence of comedy but often prove to be devoid of wit when examined more closely.

Or to employ a wit so dubious that an appalled silence might be a more reasonable response. An example: "You let a complete stranger use your loo?" says Frances de la Tour's character when she discovers that Freddie and Stuart's lavatory is occupied. "What if he comes out and rapes me?" Gales... no... tornadoes of laughter.

The basic schtick in Vicious is high-camp bitchiness, a form that reached an apogee in the American sitcom Will & Grace (on which Gary Janetti also worked). This is a sadly depleted version, though, and it's delivered by McKellen and Jacobi as if they're playing in Wembley Stadium and only the upper tiers are occupied, with a heavily semaphored effeminacy that seems to belong to an entirely different era.

That is partly the point, of course - they're supposed to be social fossils - but unfortunately nothing else in Vicious provides a believable backdrop for their self-dramatisations, from the inexplicable eagerness of the young straight neighbour to insert himself into their lives, to the jerky clockwork of the plot. Only Marcia Warren comes out of it with her dignity intact, as an absent-minded friend. Seems almost blasphemous to say it but McKellen and Jacobi should watch her and take some notes on comic acting.

You knew from the first wispy chords of The Café where we were headed. A breathy female voice, the type that suffers sensitively over many a US drama, was squeezing every last drop of maritime melancholy from Bobby Darin's swing classic Beyond The Sea.

It wasn't unpleasant - not the massacre The Smiths' Please Please Please suffers on the sickly middle-class fantasy that is the John Lewis Christmas ad - but as a cover version, it couldn't have got more whimsical.

And whimsical is The Café's default mode. As seaside postcard characters lapped over each other in the picture perfect Weston-Super-Mare café, the quirkiness built like a rising tide: failed rock stars, human statues, tarty crimpers and dreamy writers eddied around like flotsam and jetsam, playing to the idea that, well, you don't have to be mad to live at the seaside, but it probably helps.

It was hard to escape the feeling that these were characters working a little too hard to be, you know, 'characters', rather than breathing in the salty sea air and being actual people. Yet every now and again Ralf Little and Michelle Terry's script would stub its toe on a bitter rock lurking beneath the soft sand of these lost souls and yelp with a cutting wit that pulled you up short, hinting at how good The Café could be if it dug its heels into the shingle.

Marcia Warren, a brilliant actress who could play 'madcap pensioner' in her sleep, was in mid-perm at the local hairdressers when the conversation turned to children. 'Can't live with them...' she snarled from beneath her tangled mop of hair. 'Can't kill 'em!' Put that in your wish fulfilment pipe and smoke it, John Lewis.

I think some enterprising media student should do some work on the centrality of the live-in kitchen in the contemporary sitcom. Think how often you see them in domestic comedies (My Family, Outnumbered, Absolutely Fabulous, Lead Balloon), in part, I guess, because they provide a reasonably plausible intersection for every generation of a family. The sitting room, intriguingly, is more frequently used for quieter scenes between just a couple of characters, suggesting that it has taken on the role of an Elizabethan "withdrawing room" (which, as Dr Worsley explained, was the origin of the drawing room). Beyond that, I'm not sure I have a lot to say about Life of Riley, a blended-family comedy that stars Caroline Quentin and Neil Dudgeon. It offers some funny moments and a masterclass in comic acting from Marcia Warren, but it too often goes for retreads of over-familiar jokes, such as a daughter-mother reversal in respect of sexual censoriousness. It's the opposite of Marmite. If you like it I reckon you're going to like it in a take-it-or-leave-it kind of way. And if you don't, you're going to find it tricky to get heated about the fact. It does include a rather sweet baby, though, greeted with a collective crooning "Aahhh!" by the studio audience every time she appears. Which tells you quite a lot about the programme, actually.

The BBC might have axed My Family, but it's still hanging grimly on to My Step-Family - aka Life Of Riley - to satisfy its government quota for safe, middle-class, domestic nonsense.

At the start of the third series our harassed mum Maddy (Caroline Quentin) is horrified to find out her mother (Marcia Warren) has a boyfriend.

It's the set-up for some shameless over-acting as well as a bit of comedy-by-numbers where staples like a puffy bridesmaid's dress and putting a pair of red pants in with a white wash can be expected to get big laughs.

There are some flashes of originality too - like when Maddy tries to persuade her mother not to go through with her wedding and then has to back-track several times.

There's also a lovely scene where Maddy and her husband (Neil Dudgeon) imagine how their lives would be without each other.

It takes a special kind of love to move into the lodger's room in the attic while your wife makes hay with her fancy man in the master bedroom. But that was the peculiar domestic set-up at the conflicted heart of Hattie, the true - yes, true - story of Carry On comedy legend Hattie Jacques.

Ruth Jones certainly looked the part of Jacques, all twinkly eyes and comfortable cleavage, her sunny smile masking the frustration of a career cul-de-sac. 'I know my casting; I'm the frigid fat girl,' she complained, acknowledging her role as the nation's favourite chubby, a 1960s Dawn French, if you like.

But though she gave a good impression of warmth, Jones's Hattie strayed a touch too close to heartless bitch for this remarkable story to fully convince. The heart of the tale belonged to wronged husband John Le Mesurier, played by Robert Bathurst with just the right measure of unqualified love and ruffled dignity. 'He's too vague to be unhappy,' claimed Hattie, granting herself licence to cheat, but Bathurst's nuanced performance turned Le Mesurier's vagueness into a self-protective shield.

As a period piece Hattie worked superbly, its glimpses of Carry On film sets, with Marcia Warren scene-stealing as an embittered bit-parter ('I'm sick of this batty old lady s***') a diverting treat. But we didn't get enough of the self-esteem issues that bedevilled Jacques and led her to jeopardise a happy marriage by falling for a devilishly handsome wheeler dealer who made her squeal between the sheets. She fell rather too easily.

Desperate Romantic Aiden Turner certainly looked the part, all moody scowl and hairy chest, but his gor-blimey accent was comedy working class. 'I'm not a bit of rough!' he exploded but that's exactly how he came across, fine for a lusty leg-over but hardly a prospective long-term partner. Which was why Hattie kept her husband in the house to talk to, during the intervals between the sex olympics.

As I said, peculiar. It fell apart when Le Mesurier met a new love, though everyone remained remarkably civilised, and Hattie's bit of rough ultimately left her. It was all quietly sad and a noble attempt to tell a tricky tale. But I never quite fell for it.