Rebecca Front

Radio Times review

The prim Banbury suffragettes endeavour to "trek across the foothills of ignorance" and "ascend the slopes of injustice", inspired by real-life American mountaineer Annie Smith Peck. How? By distributing an uncompromising leaflet.

Once again, writer and leading lady Jessica Hynes proves mistress of the double entendre: cricket boxes, stiff whites, and fluids for her colossal new Kodak camera. Rebecca Front is delightfully withering as resolutely un-emancipated Helen, while Judy Parfitt is superb as worldly Myrtle. What's lacking are belly laughs; more often than not the gags are as gentle and mild as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage group's politics.

As Carrie Fisher proved years ago, AA can be ripe for black comedy. And so it provides the setting for Love in Recovery (Radio 4), a brilliant six-part comedy drama written by Pete Jackson. Each of the 15-minute vignettes unspool like manic Canterbury Tales, offering a set of soliloquies built around the awkward weekly meetings of disparate characters.

The first episode saw Fiona (Rebecca Front) unload her tale of shallow excess and isolation in the banking world. "I always thought that you can't have a problem when you're drinking with friends but ... everyone's your friend when you're drinking," she pointed out. Episode two finds Julie (Sue Johnston) giving an unwaveringly powerful portrait of a woman, who attempted to find happiness at the bottom of a glass after her husband of 40 years left her ("He went off with the cleaner who ironically turned out to be a dirty bitch"). Eddie Marsan plays the needy group leader Andy (memorably described as "serial-killer nice"), who is constantly offering the participants biscuits ("they're from M&S"). The series feels sharp and fresh, its realism partly derived from writer Jackson's real

Radio Times review

"If there's one thing recovering alcoholics aren't short of it's stories," says writer Pete Jackson. And he should know, as this inspired and inspiring sitcom comes from his own experience of being thrown into AA meetings with a truly disparate group of people and then finding that it's more than a problem with drink that binds them together. The fact that Jackson is working with one of the finest comedy casts on radio for years helps as well.

The previous story centred on the aggressive snob Fiona, played by Rebecca Front (be sure to listen on iPlayer if you missed it). This story belongs to Julie (played by Sue Johnston), a woman who did not start drinking, or really living, until she hit 60. Paul Kaye, John Hannah, Eddie Marsan and Julia Deakin are the rest of the players and the series is set to become a classic.

I hope that Radio 4 makes much more use of Jackson over the coming months. He's a comedy writer with talent and a heart.

Bold, bright, original comedy by Pete Jackson with a sparkling cast. Bold? It's set in a weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Bright? It's recognisably real but not self conscious about it. Original? It's honest about its characters. Tonight we meet Fiona, a banker who despises everyone se4lse, has only come because her employer made her, says she makes more money than the rest of them put together. Sparking cast? Fiona is played by Rebecca Front, Sue Johnston plays a housewife, John Hannah a journalist and Eddie Marsan is Andy, who runs the group.

Blessed with an excellent cast including John Hannah, Sue Johnston and Paul Kaye, this absorbing comedy drama focuses on a group of recovering alcoholics at their AA meetings. Writer Pete Jackson, who has been through the process himself and also co-stars as Johnny, picks up on the members' insecurities as they open up to each other, in some cases even finding love. Today, insufferable banker Fiona (Rebecca Front) marvels at her colleagues' decision to send her there.

Pete Jackson's new comedy series comes from his own experience at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It's funny, wry, recognisable. Each week his characters pool experiences while harbouring reservations. Here, for instance, is Fiona (Rebecca Front), ex-banker, competitive, bit of a snob, a sceptic,. What can she have in common with these losers? Independents Lucky Giant have a stellar cast for this (John Hannah, Sue Johnston) and they shine.

John Hannah and Sue Johnson are among the star studded cast of an unusual new six-part comedy, set in Alcoholics Anonymous, based on author Pete Jackson's personal experience. At AA meetings he found, as many do, real support from the pooled experiences of very different people, all there for one reason yet all with their own personal emotional baggage. We follow the lives of five recovering alcoholics as they get to know each other , hate each other, fight, laugh, learn as they each tell their stories. We star with Fiona (played by Rebecca Front), a competitive ex-banker, a bit of a snob. Can she come to terms with AA's essential egalitarianism?

Sky's high-concept comedy, in which therapist Rebecca Front combs over the psyches of her famous patients, concludes its second series tonight with Gracie Fields (Frances Barber) and Daphne du Maurier (Morgana Robinson) among those exposing their neuroses. One of the less amusing, and less admirable, aspects of the show is the male comedians' pantomime dame-style grotesque parodies of women, a gag taken to extremes here as Mathew Baynton, Kevin Eldon and Dustin Demri-Burns play a trio of hideous witches.

You can't knock the spirit of this comedy, in which Rebecca Front's furrow-browed therapist attends to history and fiction's most eccentric women. But despite the gusto of the performances, the gags the sessions are built on don't always live up to them. Tonight sees Bonnie Parker scheduling sessions around her crime sprees and a Lucille Ball convinced her real life is being televised. It seems to work better when the joke is madder and more incongruous, the last series' Pam Ayres/Sylvia Plath hybrid being the best example.

Over on Sky Arts 1, some light relief from Psychobitches, one of the best new comedies on TV last year, though given its tiny home, few people actually got to see it. It's a sketch show set in a therapist's office, in which famous (dead) women from history tell psychiatrist Rebecca Front their troubles. The first series was a knockout - Julia Davis played a wailing hybrid of Pam Ayres and Sylvia Plath; the Brontë sisters were foul-mouthed, filthy puppets obsessed with sex, and Sharon Horgan played a campy Eva Peron, who clung on to her bottles of "boobles". It was silly, and odd, and very funny.

This second series is almost as good, though it feels more like a traditional sketch show and is slightly patchier, perhaps due to the sheer number of writers (I counted 12 on the credits for the first episode of this double bill, and seven on the second). In the best sketch, Kathy Burke and Reece Shearsmith play the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret as crude and grotesque, glugging down booze as Burke repeatedly rejects her on-screen offspring with delicious cruelty. Morgana Robinson joins the cast to play a sloppy Anna Nicole Smith - hers is a masterclass in physical comedy - and there's a musical skit featuring Unity, Decca and Nancy Mitford, as imagined by Horgan, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Ellis Bexter. In a sketch the Mail has already called "hideous", Michelle Gomez has gone from Doctor Who's Missy to an even more terrifying villain, playing Thatcher as a Hannibal Lecter-style monster, incapable of love. It's at its finest when it's upsetting the establishment, and it relishes its naughtiness.

The second episode was less sharp. Perhaps, given its hyperactive pace, it works better in single doses. But I loved Horgan as Carmen Miranda - "Of course I'm on fucking drugs" - and Sheridan Smith as a mute Sleeping Beauty, whose endless sleep has an ulterior motive. And anything that gets Kathy Burke back on our screens, even for a few minutes, is well worth our attention.