Rebecca Front

Rebecca Front is giving her kids comedy education

Rebecca Front has said she has been giving her children home schooling in comedy.

Eager to know why Manuel from Fawlty Towers had a moustache? The worst thing about being in Blackadder? Or maybe which actors had to bring their own clothes to film a hit pilot? The answers to these hot-button issues in Jo Brand's poorly disguised old-timey clip-show are perfectly pitched, provoking - if anything - the kind of weary, non-committal, slightly surly shrug that's engendered by watching the actual programme itself.

Brand presides over a genial half-hour of sitcom quizzery that sees team leaders Rebecca Front and Barry 'Mine's a Large One!' Cryer joined by Hugh Dennis and Tony Robinson for a trawl through some well-thumbed snippets from the BBC archives. Andrew Sachs and Ian Lavender deliver creaky old war stories and Cryer delves into his endless fund of Willie Rushton anecdotes, before a round where the guests all try on a variety of wigs puts the show out of its misery.

Brand and guests are very easy people to like, but this is the worst kind of filler; to damn it with even fainter praise, it's the sort of programme that Alan Partridge would consider 'classic broadcasting'.

Radio Times review

This is billed as a panel game but it's more of a parlour game - perhaps after a stodgy supper, given the pervading air of lethargy - in which four comedy stars flop out on sofas separated by a bank of TV screens from host Jo Brand.

Team captains Rebecca Front and Barry Cryer are joined by guests Tony Robinson and Hugh Dennis, who divulge a few of their own comedy secrets and answer questions that pop up on screen from the likes of Andrew Sachs, Lesley Joseph and Shaun Williamson. It's mildly amusing, but Jo Brand is always better unscripted.

Margaret (Jessica Hynes) sends Emmeline Pankhurst a "comical" poem, which prompts a visit from the suffragette leader, despite Pankhurst (Sandi Toksvig) concurring with Helen (Rebecca Front) that the poem is "not strictly speaking comical". Margaret claims that "it gets funnier", and Hynes here could almost be describing her own sitcom: this final episode is the best, with the group trying to impress their guest with a talent showcase, and Helen revealing the real reason behind her opposition to the cause.

Rebecca Front takes centre stage

Looking back over a multifaceted career, the BAFTA Award-winning actress talks about her path into comedy, working with Armando Iannucci and being on the end of a Tucker-bashing.

Despite the impeccable credentials of everyone involved (Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine), Up The Women just doesn't fly. For a start, there's no real point; any political edge is sidestepped or dampened by the air of farce. And the humour itself is limited to double entendre, sight gags and broad physical comedy. Why couldn't the BBC have just commissioned a full series of Hynes and Julia Davis's scabrous Lizzie and Sarah instead?

How many Edwardians does it take to change a light bulb? About eight if Up the Women is anything to go by, though as one of them said: "It's hard to see how this would replace the candle."

Jessica Hynes wrote in this newspaper last week that her three-part sitcom about a group of failed suffragettes was originally intended as a film. It says nothing too complimentary about our priorities that the project ended up as a BBC4 micro-budget three-parter, shot in front of a studio audience in a two-room set.

As it was, the traces of its film script origins were detectable in Hynes's performance as the clever but timid Margaret. She proposed that the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle revitalise itself as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage. Hynes appeared to be acting in the uplifting, thoughtful movie that you would never have quite got round to seeing at your local arthouse cinema. Oddly, though, she seemed to be surrounded by performances, from Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine et al, that were sketch-show broad.

The script, too, careered between these two registers. Still, the brilliant Pepperdine had some funny false teeth and mugged her way through a quite silly knob gag. That just about got my floating vote.

Up the Women has a great premise: a ladies' craft circle is politicised by Margaret (Jessica Hynes) into forming a group to "politely request women's suffrage". It also has a great cast, including Rebecca Front as a dissenting snob ("Does your husband know you were cavorting with skirted anarchists?") and Vicki Pepperdine as a simple-minded "old maid". All it lacked was a great first episode. There were some overdone historical gags (one about a lightbulb being a "ridiculous fad" seemed to last for several years), with suffragettes described as "mannish, flat-fronted, bottom-heavy spinsters".

Up the Women seemed undecided whether to aim for a suffrage-themed Dad's Army vibe, or Blackadder-style absurdist drollery, falling nervously in between. Saying that, first episodes are notoriously tricky, and there was more than enough to merit another peek. My favourite bit was Margaret's earnest, quavering, suffragette singsong that attempted to be rousing but ending up sounding as if somebody from Songs of Praise was being gently lowered into a well.

Psychobitches is a series born out of popular acclaim for last year's pilot. Rebecca Front plays an In Treatment-style shrink for famous females from history, and it was a cracking opener, right from the first moment when Rosa Parks needed a seat in the waiting room and everyone quickly jumped up.

I'm always in the market for a pastiche of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and the one here, featuring Frances Barber as Bette Davis, and Mark Gatiss dragged up as Joan Crawford, was high-camp nirvana. Other highlights included Samantha Spiro as a fey, infuriating Audrey Hepburn, Sharon Horgan's Eva Perón, suffering from "feelings of grandiosity", and the Brontë sisters transformed into bonnet-wearing, foul-mouthed Chucky dolls.

A few of the short sketches needed to be even shorter - as in 100% shorter. On the whole, though, what a treat, to the point where I started hallucinating. It felt as though the screen was glowing, as if I were in a sci-fi movie, where an all-female (sorry, Mark Gatiss) comedy mothership suddenly appears, illuminated and throbbing, the door opening to reveal none other than Emily Wilding Davison laughing her bloomers off. But then I got over myself. It's quite enough that Psychobitches was indisputably funny.

Written by and starring Jessica Hynes, Up the Women is a gentle, charming sitcom set in 1910, and follows the transformation of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle into a branch of the suffragette movement.

Hynes plays the group's timidly radical leader Margaret, fiercely opposed by Rebecca Front's redoubtable matriarch Helen. "What on earth do women need a vote for?" Helen argues. "My husband votes for who I tell him to vote for. What could be a better system than that?"

The script is full of many fine lines, plus one excellent visual gag involving a tapestry of peonies, but it's all rather static, with the action - if action be the word - confined to a solitary village hall location and looking set to stay there.

However, the whole series is a mere three episodes long, so the chances of viewers developing cabin fever are minimal.