Rebecca Front

An amazing lineup of comic actors have a ball playing historical figures in therapy opposite Rebecca Front's ever-patient psychologist. Julia Davis puts a new twist on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Samantha Spiro is a ping-pong Audrey Hepburn, Mark Gatiss a superb Joan Crawford to Frances Barber's inspired Bette Davis. Katy Brand stars as one of three sweary Brontë sisters. It's the comedy equivalent of eating a lot of biscuits. If you miss it you will forgo the funniest thing on TV this year.

New sitcom from Jessica Hynes (Spaced). It's 1910 and the quietly intellectual Margaret (Hynes) is keen to convert fellow members of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle to the ways of women's suffrage. They include the group's formidable leader Helen (Rebecca Front), her outrageous mother Emily, perpetually pregnant Eva and the unfortunately toothed Gwen. The cast utilise every iota of their impressive comic timing, but despite the combination of Hynes, Front and feminism, the jokes are far too gentle.

Rounding off the Playhouse Presents... series, this five-part comedy sketch show makes itself comfortable on the couch for a witty variation on the therapist theme of HBO's In Treatment. Rebecca Front anchors the action as a long-suffering psychoanalyst whose appointment diary is lit up by a galaxy of stars from yesteryear, as played by some of today's finest acting talent. Stand-out headcases include Frances Barber and Mark Gatiss as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane mode), Sam Spiro (Grandma's House) as irrepressibly cutesy Audrey Hepburn and Julia Davis (Hunderby) conjuring comedic magic by mixing poet Sylvia Plath's tragic angst with the simple jollity of Pam Ayres.

Jessica Hynes leads from the front as Margaret in this jolly suffragette sitcom. A woman whose scientific mind and political aspirations are racing ahead of her fellow stitchers in the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle, Margaret is eager to embrace the modern world of 1910. A recent convert to the suffragette cause, can Margaret convince her circle to square up and join the fight for women's votes? Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and Ryan Sampson lend varying degrees of support.

Jessica Hynes moves as far as she can from her buzzword-spewing PR wonk in Twenty Twelve with a self-penned sitcom set in a church hall in Banbury in 1910. Hynes is Margaret, a mouse about to roar: she wants the other women in the local craft circle to put down their tapestries and agitate for women's suffrage.

It's a static, traditional affair. In episode one at least, we never leave the hall and its adjoining kitchen, and despite an army of additional gag-writers on the credits, you're more likely to smile creakily than laugh. But, gently, the foundations of something good are in place.

Rebecca Front and Vicki Pepperdine are terrific as a frosty antagonist and buck-toothed naïf respectively, Hynes is great as ever, and the central point - that the silly sexism of the time is still with us - lends it some edge.

After a promising pilot last year, this fitfully funny set of vignettes based around famous women visiting a therapist (Rebecca Front) returns as a series. Boasting comedic talent such as Sharon Horgan, Samantha Spiro, Julia Davis, Katy Brand and Mark Gatiss - dragged up as Joan Crawford - it's a riot when it does very silly: Sylvia Plath channelling Pam Ayres in an attempt to lift her dark moods; the squabbling, doll-sized Brontë sisters, and Jacqueline du Pré communicating only via cello.

The brilliant innuendo in the title alone is enough to sell BBC Four's new suffragette comedy, but for those of you who need more convincing (you awkward blighters) we've got plenty of reasons why you should give Up The Women a spin.

Firstly, it's written by cult favourite turned award winner (thank you Spaced and Twenty Twelve) Jessica Hynes, who also stars in the show alongside Rebecca Front - aka the woman that's appeared in practically every classic British comedy of the last two decades. And on top of that, the premise of timid Banbury woman Margaret (Hynes) attempting to convince her arts and crafts group to join the suffrage movement sounds like absolute gold. We're gonna be talking in cut-glass accents for weeks afterwards...

From Monty Python and The Holy Grail to Blackadder, it's long been established that one of the underlying rules of historical comedy is to subvert the period setting with knowingly incongruous nods to the present day. Which is all well and good when employed as part of a wider comic arsenal, but cheap and wearying when overdone.

Unfortunately, that's the fatal undoing of Jessica Hynes' Edwardian-era sitcom Up The Women, which drills away at the supposedly hilarious spectacle of characters from the past failing to comprehend things we now take for granted.

Thus we have Adrian Scarborough's hapless caretaker getting into a pickle over the installation of a light bulb, and Rebecca Front's bullying snob sniffily dismissing electricity as a fad that'll never catch on. These moments, I should point out, are clearly regarded by Hynes and her five co-writers as rib-tickling conceits of massive comic import. Given that Hynes is a fine actress and co-writer of fondly regarded sitcom Spaced, the unrelenting weakness of her latest effort is hugely disappointing. It's not unreasonable to expect more from one of Britain's foremost comedy performers.

The only truly notable aspect of Up The Women is that it's a traditional studio-bound sitcom accompanied by a live laughter track, an ancient form new to "high-brow" BBC 4. But that presents its own problems; you can clearly hear the underwhelmed audience almost willing themselves to laugh as gag after gag falls flat.

Lines such as "I've had to swaddle mother again, and she really does put up quite a fight" and "Does your husband know you're cavorting with skirted anarchists?" have the rhythmic cadence of funny dialogue, but they're not actually witty in themselves. A sense of embarrassingly forced whimsy hangs over its attempts to revel in florid language à la Blackadder. But Hynes and co aren't in the same league as Curtis and Elton at their peak.

The characters speak in a combination of BBC Edwardiana and anachronistic contemporary argot, which, if one were feeling charitable, could be regarded as a parody of Andrew Davies' penchant for dropping contemporary terms into his period dramas. But the paucity of wit on display means it's all for naught.

Hynes plays a timid yet worldly-wise idealist whose belief in the suffragette movement throws her into sharp conflict with Front's stubbornly immovable conservative. And that's about it. All concerned - including an almost unrecognisable Vicki Pepperdine from Getting On as a daffy, buck-toothed housekeeper - deliver game performances, but no amount of gusto can compensate for such poor material. Having wasted such a fine cast, Up The Women merely wanders along to unremarkable effect.

Even taking into account the inherent difficulties of introducing a brand new sitcom over the course of 30 minutes, this lifeless groaner has to be regarded as a failure.

Psychobitches, stars Rebecca Front as a therapist whose patient roster consists solely of famous women from throughout history. Essentially an excuse for a fast-paced series of disconnected sketches, this simple premise is only semi-successfully executed by co-writer/director Jeremy Dyson from The League of Gentlemen.

Resembling a surreal parody of the great In Treatment, the series begins with a neat visual gag involving Rosa Parks - I suspect that's the first and last time I'll ever place those words in that order - before roaring into gear with Front's Grandma's House co-star Samantha Spiro delivering a pitch-perfect evisceration of Audrey Hepburn's irritatingly kooky screen persona.

Unfortunately, it then devotes far too much time to a mirthless series of Brontë sisters sketches - no, it wouldn't be hilarious if they were portrayed as gruff, foul-mouthed northerners - and Julia Davis as Sylvia Plath, which, while beautifully performed, hammers its one joke into the ground. Elsewhere, Frances Barber and a dragged-up Mark Gatiss (Dyson's League of Gentlemen cohorts crop up throughout the series) sell the hell out of a warring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but without banishing memories of French & Saunders' superior take on their feud. The only other sketch that really takes flight is Sharon Horgan as a glamorously self-obsessed Eva Peron.

As an excuse for a cast of talented, funny women to show off their versatility, Psychobitches is a success. But reducing Front to a straight role feels like a waste of her abilities, which merely adds to the overall air of mild disappointment.

Rebecca Front's favourite TV

Comic actress Rebecca Front talks about some of her favourite TV shows, including It's Kevin and Playhouse Presents.