Rebecca Front

Up The Women (BBC4) also [like Psychobitches]] has fine performances by funny women, including Rebecca Front, and Jessica Hynes, who wrote it too. Hynes is a favourite of mine. It was a travesty that her wonderful nightmare PR character in Twenty Twelve was beaten to the Bafta by Olivia Colman (it was also a travesty that the overrated Twenty Twelve got the comedy Bafta ahead of Hynes's mate Julia Davis's way-more-brilliant Hunderby ... God, this is just all the same names coming up over and over again). Fans of Spaced may disagree, but on the basis of this, she's a better comic performer than she is a comic writer. They are, after all, totally different skills; writers and actors tend to be very different people.

It's not bad, it's just a bit staid. The fact that it's centred on a non-typical sitcom subject (the suffragette movement) can't disguise that it is a rather ordinary, old-fashioned sitcom. The door opens, someone comes in, does a gag, cue studio audience laughter. There's less living-room audience laughter in my house, certainly a lot less than in Psychobitches.

Step up Psychobitches (Sky Arts 1), which started out as a pilot last year but has now deservedly bloomed into a full series.

The set-up is simple. Rebecca Front, understandably striking while her iron is hot, plays psychiatrist to a succession of celebrity patients - of a decidedly retro vintage - which is basically an excuse for a host of top comic talent to show off in a series of over-the-top impressions.

In the space of 25 minutes or so, everyone from the Brontë Sisters to Margot Fonteyn by way of Nina Simone had a go at hogging the ego-crazed spotlight.

The quality control is variable but when Psychobitches is good, it's very, very good, with Samantha Spiro, a world away from her mousy turn in Grandma's House, absolutely fabulous as an infuriatingly kooky Audrey Hepburn.

Even better was Julia Davis turning chirpy Pam Ayres and tormented Sylvia Plath into a poetic double act, chipper rhymes morphing into angst-ridden soul-searching in the blink of a couplet. Delightfully bonkers.

So where would Jessica Hynes go after her brilliant turn as the spectacularly ghastly PR Siobhan in Twenty Twelve?

The answer, rather surprisingly, is back in time, donning the high collars and sturdy skirts of suburban wife Margaret - a pillar of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle - in Up The Women (BBC4).

Except that Margaret has seen the light, a brush with suffragettes in London has opened her eyes to the Votes For Women cause. Now Margaret is determined to spread the word to her fellow stitching ladies.

However, in her way stands the indomitable Helen, a woman who likes the world just the way it is - because she's in charge - and who squashes the intellectually frustrated Margaret flat, telling her: 'I know it's hard for you to accept that you've read all those books for nothing.'

This could all come across as a quaint timepiece but Hynes, who writes as well as stars, cleverly draws parallels between life now and life a century ago, without hammering the point home.

Women still have a hard time being valued on intellect alone, just as they did in Edwardian times. Margaret is a woman for all ages.

Buoyed by some fine performances - Hynes and Rebecca Front locked in psychological battle as Margaret and Helen, Vicki Pepperdine brilliant (as ever) as a cake-baking frump, Judy Parfitt squeezing every last drop of libido out of a lusty granny - Up The Women is a comedy that sneaks up on you, ambushing with sly wit rather than attacking with laugh-out-loud gags.

It's not the finished article and this is just a tester three-part run.

But I'd vote for any comedy that has Margaret explaining why she hasn't told her husband about her new-found militancy thus: 'He's been very melancholic since Nietzsche's death - I thought it might tip him over the edge.' Beyond good and evil, rock on.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Psychobitches, Sky Arts 1 new comedy series, is an all-female affair. It isn't, though nobody gets on screen without dragging up, the essential conceit being that the patient list for Rebecca Front's psychotherapist is composed entirely of famous women from history. Some of them have come to do some work on a family relationship, such as the Brontë sisters, bickering furiously in a row on the couch.

Others are working on more private problems, including Audrey Hepburn, who is having difficulty finding the fine line between being charming and infuriating. And it's very funny. As Hepburn, Samantha Spiro is terrific, winsomely inviting Front's weary therapist to play imaginary ping-pong. But Julia Davis is good too as Sylvia Plath, who excitedly confides that she's been experimenting with writing in a different persona: "Oh I wish I'd looked after me toes/ Not treated them like they were foes," she reads perkily, before black despair gradually edges out Pam Ayres.

The writing is often excellent - Charlotte Brontë's furious complaint that her oversexed sister is "frothing like a beck in a storm" seemed oddly plausible - and even the spaces between the sketches are drily funny (Jeremy Dyson directs). But it would be unfair not to give due credit to a performer who could easily get overlooked, since she's the foil and not the funny woman: Rebecca Front gets bigger laughs doing virtually nothing here than some of her co-stars do with a string of punchlines.

Unfortunate title aside, Psychobitches is a wonderfully original idea - what if famous women through the centuries were alive today and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist? In a quasi-sketch format using the talents of 10 credited writers, it's a neat construct that allows writers' imaginations free rein, unconstrained by time, place or actual facts, and gives a roll call of talented actresses (and the occasional bloke) a chance to do their very best impersonations.

Last night's opener of a five-part series (expertly directed by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson) started with Rosa Parks, not on the couch but "here for my appointment" in a glorious blink-and-you'll miss-it sight gag, where all the other women in the waiting room jumped up to offer her their seat. Actually being therapised, as it were, in the Sigmund Freud-style office, were (among others) an irritatingly winsome Audrey Hepburn (Sam Spiro), a grandiose Eva Peron (Sharon Horgan) and a self-obsessed Sylvia Plath (Julia Davis).

Plath was trying out a new writing persona in which she donned her grandmother's dress and wig and morphed into Pam Ayres - "I wish I'd looked after me toes/ Not treated them like they were foes" - one of many moments in this half-hour when I laughed out loud. It was an inspired gag. Equally good were the scenes involving the bickering Brontë sisters; Anne (Sarah Solemani) was meek but knowing, while Charlotte (Selina Griffiths) was withering about Emily (Katy Brand) needing to lose her virginity, or, as she put it in her broad Yorkshire vowels, "She should fuck off to Keighley on a Friday night and lose it to a cowhand and do us all a fucking favour."

Among the mix was Mark Gatiss and Frances Barber hamming it up marvellously as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, in full What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? mode, endlessly outdoing each other in the meanness stakes, while Rebecca Front's therapist - an unshowy part that could easily go unnoticed in this parade of misfits - was nicely pitched. There was the occasional miss, but overall this was a joy.

Rebecca Front stars in Up the Women, written by Jessica Hynes, who co-penned the rather brilliant Spaced (1999-2001) but who, strangely, has never received the same acclaim as her co-writer Simon Pegg.

Up the Women is traditional in its format - it's set mostly in one room, in this instance a village hall where the Bunbury Intricate Crafts Circle meet. It's 1910, and one of BICC's members, Margaret (Hynes) has been seduced by Suffragettism while on a day trip to London. The group's self-appointed bossy-boots leader Helen (Front), meanwhile, is having none of it when Margaret meekly suggests the group might support women's emancipation - "Women should not have the vote. We are simple, emotional creatures."

Margaret is a brainy woman who has long since accepted that women must always defer to men, even those markedly less intelligent, and a good running gag involved her explaining electricity to the overbearing caretaker (Adrian Scarborough), who was struggling to fit a new-fangled lightbulb.

The characters - particularly Vicki Pepperdine's toothy spinster - are drawn in broad strokes, and occasionally the humour (peonies being misheard for penis, for instance) is groaningly obvious. But there are some neat lines too, and superb acting from a fantastic cast who look like they're enjoying themselves, including Judy Parfitt doing a nice turn as Helen's decidedly naughty mother, Myrtle, sexually liberated long before the term was invented by the Pankhursts' spiritual daughters. Worth staying with.

This Playhouse Presents... production from last year returns for a series, boasting the same strengths and weaknesses as its pilot. It's undeniably pretty slight - the single, running gag is seeing absurdly exaggerated caricatures of famous historical women visit Rebecca Front's modern shrink and flaunt their entertaining neuroses. But the joke is carried through with enough conviction and élan to make it pretty entertaining.

Tonight's highlight is Julia Davis's turn as Sylvia Plath - but a Sylvia Plath who, concerned that her creativity might be compromising her mental health, is considering adopting the poetry stylings of Pam Ayres. Elsewhere, there are foul-mouthed Brontë sisters, an infuriating Audrey Hepburn and the endless bitching of Bette Midler and Joan Crawford. The cast is excellent - Davis, Front and Sharon Horgan are now augmented by Frances Barber and Mark Gatiss - and they're clearly enjoying themselves too. Good fun.

Jessica Hynes's first full-series sitcom since Spaced could hardly be more different: old-fashioned, a little stagey and reminiscent of Dad's Army with its band of carefully characterised misfits playing a bit part in serious events of global significance.

Hynes is Margaret, leading a superb cast including Rebecca Front (whose embittered luddite conservative is a highlight), Vicki Pepperdine and Judy Parfitt as the ladies of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. The hot debate of the day (that day being in 1910) rapidly moves from tiffin provisions to whether or not to take up the suffragette cause after Margaret returns from London bursting with politely revolutionary zeal.

The performances are game (especially from Pepperdine, shelving any vanity rather magnificently), but the satire nibbles rather than bites; it's resolutely warm, gentle stuff, lacking a little polish and a big comic set-piece. Even so, it's a concept rich with potential and Hynes has more than earned our indulgence with her performance in Twenty Twelve.

You can't libel the dead, which will be great comfort to Sky's lawyers as the Playhouse pilot from last year is expanded into a complete series.

Rebecca Front stars as a ­psychotherapist with a patient roster that reads like a Who's Who of famous women from history.

This show totally undermines the feminist message of the BBC's Up The Women, which Front also stars in, by depicting all females of achievement as neurotic loons. Still, one thing women have always been good at is laughing at themselves. I hope.

The make-up and wardrobe departments really excel ­themselves here. The joke works even before Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (Frances Barber and Mark Gatiss) open their mouths.

The squabbling Bronte sisters are brilliant, just as Samantha Spiro makes for a ­wonderfully convincing Audrey Hepburn.

And Sylvia Plath (Julia Davis) doing a Pam Ayres in an attempt to rid herself of demons is inspired. This must also be the first time that tragic cellist Jacqueline du Pre is treated as a figure of fun.

It shouldn't work, but it does.

Rebecca Front interview

The star of Psychobitches and Up the Women talks female icons, being a cool mum - and the roles she'd love to play.