Penelope Wilton

Review: After Life could've been profound. It's profane

Ricky Gervais was once hailed as an innovator of comedy. Series like The Office and Extras sealed his reputation as a man who had changed the landscape of TV comedy forever. The Office became so popular it spawned a genre and a popular American remake. Sadly, the style that was once Gervais' hallmark seems to have become something of a curse. At least based on his new Netflix series After Life.

When the zombies invade, it takes north London slacker Shaun (Simon Pegg) a while to notice, so wrapped up is he in his own world of the pub, on-off romance with Kate Ashfield's Liz, and the pub. But soon he's involved in a blend of deadpan humour and horror, ending in a John Carpenter-like siege - in the pub. Penelope Wilton and Bill Nighy add some feeling as Shaun's parents.

Penelope Wilton on working with Richard Briers

Penelope Wilton recalls filming Ever Decreasing Circles with Richard Briers in 1987.

We're back in Katherine Jakeways's fictional small market town, Waddenbrook. Sheila Hancock acts as all-seeing narrator of the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Jan is returning from a big trip abroad, and agonising. Esther and Jonathan are still trying for a baby. Jan is longing for Jonathan. At the supermarket there's a special on choc ices and the manager is still sharing his longing for his ex-wife over the Tannoy. Marvellous cast (Mackenzie Crook and Penelope Wilton among them) juggle exactly with such elements of homely surreality.

It would have been worth listening to the Radio 4 sitcom North by Northamptonshire just for Sheila Hancock and Penelope Wilton, but it turned out to be good in all sorts of other ways too. Setting it in the fictitious market town of Wadenbrook, writer Katherine Jakeways picked off local "characters" with the eagle eye of a rooftop sniper. For example, Rod relieves the tedium of managing the local Co-op by sending suggestive messages over the tannoy, while Frank and Angela celebrate their love by performing the worst ever version of Je t'aime.

Clearly a major comedy writing talent, Jakeways is as adept at coming up with stinging one-liners as she is able to create a choice gallery of English eccentrics. Casting Sheila Hancock as the narrator was inspired: her sardonic and sometimes downright snide interventions making a perfect counterpoint to the barminess of Wadenbrook's social round. I can imagine this one transferring well to TV.

New four-part comedy of the reflective kind, set in a small town bubbling with hope, fear and mistrust, a bit like an inland English Under Milk Wood, faintly reminiscent of Peter Tinniswood's lively studies in eccentricity. By Katherine Jakeways, it has the great benefit of Sheila Hancock as narrator, Mackenzie Crook as Rod, the supermarket manager, and the author herself as Esther, the very assertive instructor of both driving and judo. The overall plot is how they're all getting ready for a talent night, produced by Mary (fab Penelope Wilton).

Katherine Jakeways' tale of a small town preparing for a talent show is a comedy cracker. Penelope Wilton, Mackenzie Crook and Sheila Hancock lead the cast in what is a tender look at British eccentricity, community and a slideshow featuring inappropriate images of Victorian ladies, and also a very funny half-hour.

Oddly enough, North by Northamptonshire doesn't spell 'bugger all' backwards, although that is roughly the message emitted by playwright Katherine Jakeways about small-town life. With a narrator helicoptering above the characters, whose innermost impulses are purportedly revealed, the drama is clearly begging to be compared to Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, set in Llareggub with its famously mischievous spelling... in its dreams.

For while Thomas' dramatis personae, in all their disappointed, perverted, mixed-up reality are revealed in subliminal flashes and dreams, Jakeways' people bare all in daylight. Vomit, infertility, yawn-inducing pubescent fantasies and the loneliness of the middle-aged divorcee contemplating a Jane Austen box-set and a bag of chocolate raisins are variously presented for our consumption. It is at once too much information and not enough. Everything is regurgitated 9 to 5, leaving these characters with all the backstory of Teletubbies.

While Thomas had two narrators, one delineating conscious activity, the other overseeing the subterranean world of the psyche, here there is just one, the estimable Sheila Hancock. Poor Sheila Hancock, she sounds as if she doesn't know where to look. Her magisterial yet subtle inflexions are completely wasted as she introduces the supermarket manager (Mackenzie Crook), who jokes over the tannoy about vomit in the aisles, so she settles for a faintly reproving note. Penelope Wilton's wonderfully dolorous tones are also underemployed as the producer of a talent contest, gently prodding the posh teenager, whose interest in history is entirely based on the amount of cleavage on show in portraits.

Jakeways has another role beyond that of author. She plays Esther, the most obnoxious character of all, who indulges in public humiliation of her husband (Kevin Eldon) for his failure to make her pregnant. If Esther was a finely-crafted suburban gorgon, a creature at once excessive and yet explicable, a Lady Macbeth or Miss Havisham of the boot-making shire, this would make sense. Actually this was another case of a woman diminishing a man, because that has become as acceptable as the opposite is unacceptable.

A new four-part series with the potential to become a classic in the Little Britain mode. An all-star cast - Sheila Hancock, Mackenzie Crook, Penelope Wilton, Felicity Montagu and Kevin Eldon - star in Katherine Jakeways' comedy about stultifying small-town obscurity, where middle-aged no-hopers live lives of quiet desperation and the young leave town at the earliest opportunity.

The laughs are cruel, but the monsters of suburbia are curiously sympathetic, and the characters so well drawn and well played that this could run and run.