Olivia Colman

Only Fools And Horses went downhill when Del and Raquel had a baby; will the same happen to our beloved Peep Show? Not likely, judging by this new series opener. While Mark (David Mitchell) waits anxiously in hospital for the birth of his unwanted progeny with Sophie (Olivia Colman), Jeremy (Robert Webb) swiftly gets over Elena when he meets Zahra, whose boyfriend is in a coma. Noooo!

So Mark and Jez are back with the seventh series of Channel 4's longest-running sitcom - which means we've all got something amusing to talk about that doesn't involve people eating kangaroos' bums. Of course, we know exactly what to expect from the socially awkward duo by now - but seven years on, you'd think they might be forced to face up to a few more responsibilities as well.

Sure enough, last night's Peep Show opener saw Mark (David Mitchell) overwhelmed at becoming a father for the first time. But more importantly, in Mark's eyes at least, a burst boiler at home turned out to have been less catastrophic than originally feared. "Minimal water damage!" he exclaimed joyfully on hearing the news, while cradling his newborn baby in his arms.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Prior to the birth, we saw Mark trying - and failing - to support ex-girlfriend Sophie (Olivia Colman) in the maternity ward. Meanwhile, Jez (Robert Webb) trundled off round the hospital and fell in lust with Zahra (Camilla Beeput), who was visiting her comatose boyfriend. In a bid to impress her, he agreed to read out passages from FHM to her unconscious partner - providing just one of the episode's many laugh-out-loud moments.

Still, my favourite moment came when Jez promised Mark he'd find someone to fix the boiler. This could only mean one thing. Sure enough, Super Hans (Matt King) showed up with a "mate who knows a bit about plumbing" - but found time to offer Mark some words of wisdom about childbirth. "Stay away from the goal end," he advised. "And trip your nuts off."

In real life, you'd probably run a mile to avoid Mark and Jez. But seeing the 21st century's version of The Likely Lads return to the small screen is one of the most welcome sights on TV.

Islam and lap-dancing. Not two subjects you'd usually expect to find rubbing shoulders in the same sitcom but then the life of a modern London vicar is nothing if not rich and varied.

Tonight's episode sees the Rev opening his church to a children's Muslim prayer class and visiting the local gentleman's club with Lucy Liemann's sexy headmistress - purely in the interests of research, of course.

There are plans to open a lap-dancing club right next to the C of E school and before Adam objects he needs to have first-hand knowledge of what it is he's opposed to exactly. That it doesn't even occur to his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) to object to either the lap-dancing or the headmistress tells you everything you need to know about Adam's wholegrain moral fibre.

His unique selling point is his "well­­meaningness" and Tom Hollander portrays him beautifully.

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

In a medium awash with lazy stereotypes, it's original thinking that stands out. The most compelling television provides a new perspective on an old story, and challenges the laziest of preconceptions with wit, humour and more than a dash of bravado.

BBC Two's new series Rev is pretty much a masterclass in how to pull this off. Take one fine actor (Tom Hollander), add an equally brilliant supporting cast (Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney, Ellen Thomas), choose a fraught subject (religion), throw in some punchy writing (James Wood) and get Peter Cattaneo (of The Full Monty fame) to direct the lot and what have you got? A damn fine reason to stay up late on Monday nights, that's what.

Firstly, the subject matter: religion, or more specifically, the Church of England. With the notable exception of Father Ted, comedies involving vicars tend to be soporifically safe. Not only is Rev travelling without seatbelts, it is also doing 90 miles an hour down country lanes with the roof off and the stereo on full blast. This is no gentle cake-and-cassock comedy; it's the story of an ordinary, fallible vicar living in a tough, brutal world who is trying to do something very extraordinary: stay true to his faith.

That the Reverend Adam Smallbone is an ordinary fellow we know from his behaviour. He is a man who jumps the lights on his bike, who gets nervous and drinks too much at parties, who tries (and fails) to have sex with his wife. His flawed but irresistibly likeable persona comes across loud and clear in just a few opening moments, brilliantly pinpointed by the direction, the writing and, of course, by Hollander himself, whose performance is outstanding.

The themes, too, are unrelentingly contemporary. Smallbone is in charge of St Saviours, a grand, dilapidated church in a run-down inner-city area of London with a confusingly mixed catchment. There are the regulars, a rag-tag collection of locals led by Colin, the neighbourhood ne'er do well, who has a fond affection for the "vicarage"; and there are the newcomers, in the shape of the arrogant, urbane middle classes, led by the local MP, played as a modern-day social Flashman by Alexander Armstrong. Simon McBurney is deliciously oily as the Archbishop, who Smallbone only ever seems to encounter in the back of a taxi, all black leather gloves and dark threats.

The opening theme is current and controversial: "On your knees, avoid the fees", chirps Armstrong's villainous MP, as he horse-trades a place for his delinquent son in exchange for cash to repair the broken stained glass window of St Saviours. It's a merciless commentary on modern life; but it also has a surprisingly strong moral, dare I say thoughtfully theological, core. The temptations that assail Smallbone may be very contemporary in their nature; but they are as eternal as the themes of the Bible itself: right v wrong, truth v corruption, the poor v the rich.

As to the comedy, it's of the organic kind, not the obvious gag kind. Outside the church, the Reverend and Colin share a bottle of beer and discuss Richard Dawkins (as you do). "If I met him I'd kick him in the bollocks," says Colin, with customary frankness. Earlier Smallbone, confronted for the nth time by a group of sneering builders and their spectacularly unfunny jokes about choir boys, pauses. Slowly, and with a look of weary resignation, he removes his dog-collar. "Why don't you just f*** off," he says. The viewer punches the air with joy.

A new sitcom about an inner-city London vicar may not sound promising, but Rev is laugh-out-loud funny. At its heart lies Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander), whose congregation is suddenly swelled by the "on your knees, avoid the fees" brigade when rumours spread that the church school is about to get a glowing Ofsted report. Both an exploration of British hypocrisy and a warmly played character piece with some terrific lines. With Olivia Colman and Alexander Armstrong.

Tom Hollander makes a bid here to join Derek Nimmo and Dawn French in the small but cosy pantheon of sitcom vicars. He plays the Reverend Adam Smallbone, a well-meaning, unshaven, east London clergyman who smokes, drinks enthusiastically and does the splits at parties, but is sweetly ineffectual in the face of the problems he faces. They include a domineering archdeacon and a rash of pushy parents hoping to get their children into "his" C of E school, whose headmistress Smallbone clearly fancies. It's a gentle, ragged sort of comedy, short on belly laughs but with enough character-led jokes to offer hope for good things to come. Alexander Armstrong brings his expert comic timing to the role of a bluff MP who is one of the "On your knees, avoid the fees" crowd. The wonderful Olivia Colman seems (so far) slightly wasted in the role of the vicar's wife, but given time, and given Hollander's rumpled charm in the lead, it could be a quiet winner.

When Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews created Father Ted in 1995, they breathed new life into the stereotype of the comedy vicar, a character that for too long had been suffocated by the tyrannical stranglehold of Derek Nimmo. Unfortunately Richard Curtis simultaneously came up with The Vicar of Dibley, a programme as twee and mediocre as any number of Nimmo's cassock-based comedies.

Perhaps realising that the realm of the ecclesiastical sitcom hasn't been successfully exploited in a while, acclaimed comic actor Tom Hollander has co-created Rev, in which he plays a harassed vicar at a struggling inner city London church.

Sadly, despite the talent involved - the cast also includes Alexander Armstrong, Finding Eric's Steve Evets, Peep Show's Olivia Colman and comedian Miles Jupp - this low-key comedy is a disappointment. The blame must lie with writer James Wood, who also wrote the similarly underwhelming media satire Freezing, in which Hollander's ferocious comic performance was the sole highlight.

The jokes in Rev are sparse, weak and principally based around the supposedly amusing conceit of a vicar acting in ways you wouldn't expect. So, the Reverend Adam Smallbone, played with amiable anxiety by the always watchable Hollander, smokes, drinks, swears and enjoys sex with his wife.

So, I imagine, do a lot of modern priests - indeed, a group of them are credited as technical advisors - but that doesn't mean the concept is funny in itself. Father Ted admittedly employed similar material, albeit far more inventively than Wood does.

The opening episode takes underpowered swipes at middle-class pretentions and hypocrisies when Smallbone faces a moral dilemma over the sudden rise in church attendance due to a glowing Ofsted report on a local church school. But the episode just dawdles along and not even Hollander's bumbling charm can save it. Rev, like many sitcoms before, may improve as it goes on, but there's precious little here to encourage you to find out.

I've got a friend who's a vicar. Nice chap, pretty cool, not the sort whose job you'd necessarily guess if you spotted him in civvies.

So I thought perhaps I'd show him my preview DVD of this new sitcom, just to get his thoughts, seeing as the main character is a man of the cloth. Then I decided against it, because there's quite a bit of swearing and a fair few sexual references - and, in all honesty, not that many belly laughs.

Tom Hollander plays Reverend Adam Smallbone, preaching to a dwindling congregation at his London church - but surprised to discover, in this opening episode, that a lot of new faces are suddenly showing up. Surprised, that is, until he realises they have an ulterior motive. Olivia Colman and Alexander Armstrong also star.

This intelligent new sitcom offers a much more gentle take on clerical comedy than Father Ted. Actor and co-creator Tom Hollander, who stars as the Reverend Adam Smallbone, was intrigued by the idea of a classic Church of England vicar being thrust into a parish in the unforgiving urban jungle of London.

The cast clearly had faith in Hollander's vision, because he's got the wonderful Olivia Colman (Green Wing, Peep Show) as his wife Alex and Lucy Liemann (Moving Wallpaper, Reggie Perrin) as the local headmistress, alongside Alexander Armstrong guesting hilariously this week as an MP.

With the London landmark of St Leonard's church in Shoreditch standing in for the fictional St Saviours in the Marshes, tonight the Rev is delighted to see the meagre ranks of his congregation swelling - until he discovers the parents are just trying to boost their religious credentials to get their kids into the good C of E school round the corner. And Adam faces a moral conundrum about whether he should award places in return for money.

The Archdeacon (a brilliant turn by Simon McBurney), who holds very unsentimental views about a vicar's role in the inner city, would undoubtedly think so. He seems to be constantly circling the capital in a black cab and there's a lot of mileage in this character, in every sense.

Rev's mission isn't to make you roll on the floor laughing. It's subtle and thoughtful, with heart and soul as well as a funny bone. I'll say Amen to that.