Nicola Walker

Radio Times review

The scope widened in series two of the Bafta-winning romantic drama, with as much screen time devoted to family strife as to pensionable lovers Alan and Celia's late-blooming courtship. Not that this is in any way a problem - in fact we now care just as much for the younger adults as we do for the recently reunited sweethearts. The key is the wit and wisdom that runs through Sally Wainwright's scripts, all subtly performed by such stars as Sarah Lancashire and the peerless Nicola Walker, the latter of whom was a picture of anguish for most of the run.

Though Alan and Celia are the twin heartbeats of Last Tango, in many ways this series has been about the flourishing of another relationship, the one between their daughters Caroline and Gillian.

Last week's episode was pivotal for the women when, in vino veritas, spiky, defensive Gillian (Nicola Walker) revealed a very dark episode from her past to an unwitting Caroline (Sarah Lancashire). Tonight, in the last instalment of the series, the pair emerge from a foggy alcoholic night to take stock.

But don't run away with the idea that it's all grim. There is a wedding to organise as Alan and Celia (Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi) renew their vows on a snowy Christmas Eve. It's a lovely occasion and writer Sally Wainwright, with her gift for putting her finger exactly on a drama's emotional pulse, brings us an occasion to cherish.

Last Tango in Halifax, series 2, episode five, review

It's Nicola Walker's turn to shine in the latest Last Tango in Halifax episode.

Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker shine

I found this to be a thoroughly satisfying instalment of a series that's had its ups and downs.

Poor Alan and Celia. Getting married secretly without telling their families is meant to be "just a bit of fun," say the hapless, happy couple. But their rash romanticism falls on stony ground as chippy, glum Gillian sees it as a betrayal. Oh, Gillian. It's tempting to yell at her, "Why don't you just cheer up, love?" but she has much to be anguished about. She thinks her lovely dad's common sense-filled head has been corrupted by his new association with sinfully bourgeois Harrogate, and her son delivers an emotional torpedo that threatens to blow up that gloomy family farmhouse on the moors.

It's another carefully calibrated episode of Sally Wainwright's smashing drama, as her characters push the frontiers of their lives into new and uncharted territories. For Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid), Gillian and Caroline (Nicola Walker and Sarah Lancashire) so much is about to change....

Nicola Walker shines in another brilliant instalment

Nicola Walker was the star of the episode in my opinion as she totally made you feel for Gillian throughout the course of the story.

It's been a thinnish week for drama but Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright's almost sugar-free romance about two pensioners - former lovestruck teenagers reunited by Facebook after 60 years - was back for a second series having won the nation's affection and a Bafta last time out.

We found the pair almost as we left them, with the excellent Derek Jacobi as Alan, recovering from a heart attack brought on by their hasty quarrel about the desirability of lesbianism in Harrogate and perhaps one too many respiratory struggles with glottal northernisms (the downfall of many a thespian). Much has been made of this septuagenarian double act, and Jacobi and Anne Reid, a natural as Celia, shone even when they were just gazing over t'moors and talking about dead people.

It would be a gentler story, though, without the complications whipped up by their clashing daughters - Gillian (Nicola Walker), a widowed single mum and grubby farmer with an impulsive sex drive, and freshly outed Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), snooty head teacher of a school that sings Jerusalem every morning - each conscious, amid declarations of love and alarm bells at the realisation that old people have minds of their own, of festering parental disapproval that recent events could only aggravate.

With Caroline's dalliance with a junior female colleague out in the open, it was Gillian's turn to stir the pot with revelations of a drunken shag with Caroline's multi-philandering husband John (a wonderfully furtive Tony Gardner). I couldn't say whether this was more transgressive than Gillian's earlier eye-opener - seeing her carrying on (Yorkshire for sexual intercourse) with a lad young enough to be her son from the local filling station - but it had Derek Jacobi shaking his head. "You pillock," he said, a word that wasn't quite equal to his disappointment (he was thinking of the shame she had brought upon the house as a pregnant 15-year-old), but served to draw a line under the affair before he had another heart attack. In the end we left the lovebirds understandably sloping off to the register office for a deserved quiet wedding. But will they get it? Tune in Tuesday.

Last Tango in Halifax returns for more generation games

One of the things that makes Last Tango so life-like is how wonderfully petty and two-faced it allows its characters to be, and the scenes between Caroline and Gillian are deftly handled by Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker.

Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid resume their touching romance as mature lovebirds Alan and Celia for a second season of laughter and tears. Having narrowly cheated death last time out, Alan has a renewed zest for life and, apart from a spot of rock climbing, what he really, really, wants to do is be married to Celia - and the sooner the better. As for daughters Gillian and Caroline, the near-fatal crisis appears to have brought the families closer together. But the honeymoon period hits turbulence when Caroline's wastrel ex John enters the scene and complex emotions bubble to the surface. Nicola Walker, Sarah Lancashire and Tony Gardner co-star.

At the end of the first series of Sally Wainwright's winning, warm-hearted drama, dear Alan was hovering between life and death after a heart attack. Obviously he survives, or there wouldn't be much point in returning to Yorkshire for a second helping.

It's great to see everyone again in a drama where pensioners are loved, cherished and never dismissed as inconvenient, and this time the masterly Wainwright has broadened the drama to dig deeper into other characters, notably Caroline (Sarah Lancashire, who's excellent) the newly-confident and newly out lesbian. While Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid) mend the relationship that almost fractured for ever, there's a shift in the tectonic plates in the romantic lives of their families. Just look at poor Gillian (Nicola Walker), who is made to pay for her terrible mistake in sleeping with John (Tony Gardner), Caroline's pathologically hopeless estranged husband. No one does bleating wretchedness like Gardner - no one.