Miranda Richardson

Letter To My Younger Self: Miranda Richardson

"I don't do social media. I need the human voice"

Blackadder's greatest episodes

With an ensemble cast that no other sitcom can ever hope to match, the show gave us plenty of memorable episodes, but we've tried to narrow them down to just a select few.

A repeat for Steve Pemberton's glorious 2014 adaptation of EF Benson's comic novels about a pair of upper-class ladies engaged in elegantly acidic one-upmanship in a 1930s seaside town. Miranda Richardson is sublime as Miss Elizabeth Mapp (sporting, as Spike Milligan would say, great "English teeth, shining in the sun" - along with a sly lunacy lurking just behind the eyes), while Anna Chancellor as the snobbish Mrs Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas makes the perfect foil.

Walliams's sidekick tonight is Miranda Richardson, which is obviously no problem: her turn in Blackadder II remains a pinnacle of sitcom performance. However, having a different sparring partner each week emphasises the patchiness of sketch shows; plus, this week it launches with a lazy riff on avaricious estate agents. The lawyers specialising in hurt feelings compensation feels like satire waiting for reality to catch up, though.

TV review: Walliams & Friend with Miranda Richardson

I don't know how much this week's guest Miranda Richardson cost but I did wonder how available she was as she doesn't do a great deal in this episode.

The 12 best worst poets on TV

Including Baldrick, Guy Secretan and the Vogons.

One seasonal highlight was the Mapp and Lucia remake (BBC One) starring Anna Chancellor, Miranda Richardson and most of the cast of The League of Gentlemen. Not having read the original E.F. Benson novels (though, of course, I'm going to now) I couldn't tell you whether this was a grotesque travesty or the very thing, but my family and our New Year's hosts were royally amused. Especially by the 'g'ru'.

In fact, I was so impressed that I very nearly blew out my New Year's Eve party proper so I could stay at home and watch the final episode while everyone else went out and played. Glad I didn't, though, because the party I went to was rather fun, full of charmingly debauched semi-youth telling me useful things, like this game that I think we should all try some time, where you send those Chinese lanterns into the air over your estate, then shoot them down with fireworks from a home-made rocket-launch tube. Were they kidding me or is this actually possible?

Mapp and Lucia was phenomenal, successive nights of the most deliciously moreish television made last year. The adaptation by Steve Pemberton of E.F. Benson's exquisitely flensed comedy of manners, set in Rye in the 1920s/30s (and it really is still that lovely), when a certain rarefied form of life actually depended on a bustling church noticeboard for its every social, spiritual, ethical, sartorial and sexual sustenance, could have been carried by the eponymous leads alone for the whole three nights.

Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women - ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death - caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns. Richardson in particular was again phenomenal; her silent lipsticked mouth spoke volumes. It was rainbowed and beaming when happily and hissily besmirching her "friend" with the sarcastic term "precious one", or even when genuinely happy, high on unkindness, after a rare coup: but its cochineal would plummet, in repose, to a clownish moue, a faded curtain of dried lip-lines rusted with frustration. But Chancellor was no slouch; even though she won 90% of the battles, when scorned her wrath was ungovernable, and would have had 90% of ovaries (and every testicle around) fleeing for the Downs.

As I said, they could have carried it themselves, but there was glorious support. Pemberton himself as proto-gay Georgie; Poppy Miller and Mark Gatiss and Nicholas Woodeson, and Rye itself. The plots, such as they were - a dodgy Indian guru, an art competition, a something involving the Prince of Wales - were negligibly delightful. But the subplots - the mutating fashions for friendships, brief fads, the power of money, benign unacknowledged homosexuality, misappreciated appreciation for what passes for intellect (or class), the joy of witchy bitchiness - never more relevant. E.F. Benson left a little more of a canon than this: please, bring it on, and leave Downton looking like the Titanic after the feet got damp.