Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman: Vicar's wife in Tom Hollander's Rev

Olivia Colman explains was like on the set of Rev, how she hopes the show will be received and why comparisons to the Vicar Of Dibley are wide of the mark.

Interview with the stars of Rev

Interviews with Tom Hollander, Olivia Colman, Steve Evets and Ellen Thomas.

Interview: Olivia Colman

We catch up with Peep Show actress Olivia Colman to find out all about her new BBC2 comedy series Rev...

Olivia Colman in Rev

Peep Show's Olivia Colman talks about her next TV role as a vicar's irreverent wife.

Based on a memoir by Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys department store, the second series of this camp and sweary sitcom comes to an end next week. Tonight Simon (Luke Ward-Wilkinson) recounts the story behind how he won the Turner Prize. The X Factor's Dannii Minogue turns up in a sprightly comic turn and there are some lovely jokes throughout, some of which err on the far side of strict decency. Olivia Colman and Aidan McArdle play Simon's parents.

Fashion designer Simon Doonan (Samuel Barnett) remembers an early trip to see the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as this slightly silly and surreal comedy drama based on Doonan's real-life memoirs continues. Along with best friend Kylie he dreams of making a success of their boyband Emale and the pair leap at the chance to see Europe's campest pop stars in the flesh. Olivia Colman is also great fun as Simon's common mother who invites the new gay neighbours round for dinner only for the visit to end when one of the pair makes a pass at Simon's father.

Simon's back from New York with a broken heart and off reminiscing about his childhood again. Back in the 90s, 14-year-old Simon is researching his family tree when he discovers his parents have a shocking secret. He self-harms with his mum's lip-liner to cope. It's a strange comedy, sustained entirely by bad jokes. The performances are brilliant, particularly Olivia Colman, who steals every one of her scenes, but the script is shocking. Still, Starting Together by Su Pollard doesn't see the light of day that often, so that's one good thing to come out of it.

Winner of the Best Comedy Award at the Banff TV Festival (no, me neither) this sitcom is an acquired taste - a cocktail of Advocaat and helium. Simon Doonan's memoirs of Reading ("Reading: You're Welcome To It," as the road sign puts it), the start of series two finds its caricature of family life still slapping on comedy with a spangly trowel.

Surprisingly, it's written by Jonathan Harvey who penned Gimme Gimme Gimme and creates some of the funniest scripts on Corrie. In one interview he said he originally thought that writing for the soap would be beneath him. If he thought Corrie was beneath him, he must have needed a diving bell to sink to the comedic depths of Beautiful People.

The cast - including Olivia Colman and Aidan McArdle as Simon's parents - gamely give it their best shot tonight as Simon discovers that, gasp, they're not married.

It's sadly the last in the series of the sharp-witted sitcom and Mark (David Mitchell) is worried that Jeff (Neil Fitzmaurice) is becoming a potential rival father to his unborn child. So he decides to learn to drive in order that he can take Sophie (Olivia Colman) to the hospital when the baby arrives.

Of course, for many of us, this week was not just some normal, ho-hum weeky week: as unremarkable as April 7-14, say, or, I dunno, February 19-26 inclusive. No. This week was Peep Show week. The return of the sitcom locked in a permanent, and fabulous, battle of champions with The Thick of It to be the definitive show of what we must, still, sighingly, refer to as "the Noughties". Peep and Thick are like the John McEnroe and Björn Borg of comedy - sometimes one triumphs, sometimes the other, but for miles and miles around there's no real competition. No competition at all. That one writer - Jesse Armstrong - works on both lends the very real possibility that he might be the funniest person in Britain.

I'm not in the habit of suggesting that the Government should forcibly take sperm samples from scriptwriters, and keep them in a cryogenic vault, in the event of a "comedy emergency" in which everyone funny dies, and we need to restock Britain's gag-writing ability with a concerted breeding programme. But, you know, it might be worth bearing in mind.

As series six starts, Peep Show's profile - once so "cult" that its future looked perilous - has never been higher. The inexorable rise of David Mitchell - thinking lady's beaky sex-penguin du jour - means that even the show's first trailer was subject to mass excitement on Twitter. When we last saw Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell), they had just found out that either one of them might be the father of Sophie's (Olivia Colman) forthcoming baby. This is an usually "big" plot for the show - after all, even when Super Hans (Matt King) got addicted to crack ("That stuff is more-ish!"), it didn't really take up more than six or seven gags.

Within minutes of the first episode opening, more "big" stuff has happened - Mark has got the terminally feckless Jez a job at his company, JLB - but then JLB goes bust. The sexy business dick Alan Johnson (Paterson Joseph, playing one of the all-time amazing sitcom characters) comes to deliver the bad news: "I just got in from Aberdeen. JLB no longer exists. Thank you, Britain, and good night!" and then is driven away at top speed in a company car.

"That's the last Beemer out of Saigon," Mark sighs. The problem was that, as the episode went on, I noted, with mounting terror, that I wasn't really ... laughing. Yeah, there were a couple of nodding smiles, and the "Beemer" line got what would, on a Laugh Graph, be called "a snorty chuckle", but ... the usual, glorious, abandoned fug of a) borderline hysteria and b) intense emotional anguish, caused by minutely observed cases of total t***tishness, wasn't descending.

I was looking a cataclysm in the face: that Peep Show might have "gone off". We've all got to stop being funny some time. Maybe this was their time. Maybe it was all. Over. Or - maybe it was just a bad opening episode? So I rang people. I blagged. I cried. I sent a courier that cost £38. I got episode 2 sent over, and sat down to watch it in a state of pre-emptive tension rivalled only by the day before my C-section. And oh, thank God - episode 2 is one of the best episodes yet. Mark and Jez have a debate about the temperature setting on a boiler that is less like dialogue, more like an MRI scan of the idiot human brain. Then, later, Jez gets to deliver the line, "I'm a feminist - so I believe women should have any mad thing they want." It's all going to be OK. It's all still amazing. When The Thick of It comes back next month, the skies will be, once again, filled with the boom and clatter of their glorious rivalry.