Rebecca Front

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.

A double bill to launch the new series of this splendidly daft sketch comedy from The League Of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson. Rebecca Front returns as the ever-patient psychologist and a dazzling cast of comedy performers - including Katy Brand, Morgana Robinson, Sam Spiro, Sharon Horgan, Doon Mackichan and Liza Tarbuck - play fantastically loopy women from history. Tonight Anna Nicole Smith comes to talk about her love life, and Anne Boleyn hopes for a happy resolution in her couples therapy.

Radio Times review

As the title suggests, this sketch-comedy doesn't purport to offer a balanced portrayal of the historical subjects it puts in the therapist's chair. Instead, it's a rare chance to see some of our finest comic actresses freed from the shackles of realism.

In the first of a double bill, we see Kathy Burke transformed into a louche, foul-mouthed Queen, Sharon Horgan crooning angst as country singer Tammy Wynette and a breathy Morgana Robinson as Anna Nicole Smith. Fresh from playing enigmatic Missy in Doctor Who, Michelle Gomez steals the show as a clipped, impeccably coiffed Margaret Thatcher. "Love?" she sneers, when Rebecca Front's long-suffering therapist tentatively broaches the subject - "it's a fictitious concept, like heaven or peace or God."

In the therapy room of Rebecca Front's psychiatrist - where some of history's most iconic and eccentric women go to get their psyches soothed - will be the likes of Michelle Gomez, Kathy Burke and Samantha Spiro (back as a maddeningly annoying Audrey Hepburn); while new patients include Morgana Robinson playing Anna Nicole Smith, Meera Syal as the goddess Hera and Alexa Chung as The Girl With A Pearl Earring.

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