Owen Teale

In My Skin takes three awards at BAFTA Cymru

Coming-of-age drama In My Skin has won three awards at the BAFTA Cymru film and TV awards ceremony. It claimed best television drama, author Kayleigh Llewellyn took best writer and Molly Manners won best director fiction.

Best actor went to Owen Teale for Dream Horse.

Dream Horse review

A celebration of community that feels natural.

Dream Horse review

Cinemas are open, so the feel-good Brit comedy is back.

Ruth Jones's poignant, charmingly observed Welsh Valleys comedy drama continues. Tonight sees a search organised for Dai (Owen Teale), while his estranged wife Paula (Elizabeth Berrington) deals with the issue in a more proactive way - by expressing her feelings at the Got to Dance auditions in front of Ashley Banjo (a shameless bit of Sky1 self promotion). Elsewhere, Bobby (Aled Pugh) conducts his first solo funeral but there's a problem when two families arrive at the cemetery and find only one burial plot.

Stella herself is hardly in it this week - the ensemble is good enough to take the strain. Paul Kaye joins as a Dutch new age therapist who soon has half of Pontyberry sitting in a semi-circle listening to Tubular Bells. Once Dai Davies has put his pasty away and Auntie Brenda has shut up, top of the agenda is asking the universe to put the other Dai back on terms with his disaffected wife.

As Dai, Owen Teale is brilliant at both drunken self-pity and, in the therapy session, gushy optimism.

Tricky times for the Pontyberry menfolk. The university ball is fast approaching for Sunil (Rory Girvan), which means he'll have to fend off his vampish fellow student Leah once and for all, and remember his wife and child at home.

Alan (Steve Speirs) has to think about his next move, with his job as a lollipop man coming to an end after "three years, man and boy" and his snotty ex-wife strutting around with gifts for Little Alan. Worst of all is the predicament that Dai (Owen Teale) finds himself in.

He's jobless and, in a strand that forms part of one of the funniest episodes Stella has yet produced, still unable to perform in the bedroom. Auntie Brenda (Di Botcher) comes to the rescue with some blue pills she picked up in Spain: "They'll turn a button mushroom into a stick of celery before you can say Heston Blumenthal."

Like another of Sky1's comedies, Starlings, Ruth Jones's series remains adept at observing the humour and hardships of life. As season two continues, Stella (Jones) has confessed to Sean (Kenny Doughty) about her night with her ex (Mark Lewis Jones) and not surprisingly he is planning to leave Pontyberry - but there is a twist in the tale. Her mood isn't improved when she hears that her eldest child, Luke (Craig Gallivan), has been deported from Canada, while undertaker Paula (Elizabeth Berrington) falls out with Dai (Owen Teale) because of his tendency to make-up the dead to "look like Joan Rivers".

It's a tribute to the strength of Ruth Jones's writing (and the on-screen class of old hands like Elizabeth Berrington and Owen Teale) that Stella - returning tonight for a second series - works as well as it does. In other hands, this relentlessly gentle comedy-drama would be intolerable. But Jones's obvious affection for her characters is counteracted by the occasional mischievous zinger, tonight mostly provided by Stella's Auntie Brenda in the time-honoured role of 'OAP who can say the unsayable'.

As we rejoin Stella in the Welsh valleys, we find her still confused over the identity of her imminent baby's father, and her extended family about to come home to roost. Elsewhere, Berrington and Teale are the pick of a solid supporting cast as Paula and Dai, their bedroom activities now compromised by Dai's new job at the funeral parlour.

Stella psyches herself up for her date with Sean but is terrified of him seeing her in the buff. Big Alan still thinks he's in with a chance and hopes to woo her at the rugby. Meanwhile, her brother Dai goes to pieces when the benefits office questions his disability payments, and a letter arrives from Canada with life-changing news for Luke. But the plot is mildly diverting background for Ruth Jones's performance and able support from Elizabeth Berrington and Owen Teale. If it was in any doubt, the show has second series written all over it.