Ruth Jones (I)

The Beeb's drama department has carved out a neat niche with its biopics of beloved British comedy stars: from Kenneth Williams and Tony Hancock to Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise. This latest film, first shown on BBC Four in January, is a worthy addition. Gavin & Stacey's Ruth Jones stars in an acclaimed dramatisation of Carry On star Hattie Jacques's life. Though she played an austere matron on screen, Jacques's private life was actually rather racy. The story focuses on the early 1960s love triangle between Jacques, her chauffeur (Aidan Turner) and her husband, Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier (a heartbreaking turn from Cold Feet's Robert Bathurst) - whom she continued to love, even when she moved her toyboy into their bed. It's a bittersweet story, superbly acted, and followed by a repeat of Jacques's 1963 appearance on This Is Your Life.

If you missed this superior biographical drama when it was shown earlier this year, here's a good chance to catch up. Ruth Jones is mesmerising as Hattie Jacques, a beloved comic actor who became part of a domestic ménage with adored husband John Le Mesurier and sexy younger man John Schofield. The story is irresistible: Schofield (Being Human's Aidan Turner) meets Hattie after a charity event and the two are quickly in the grip of an electrifying sexual passion. Bizarrely, even incredibly, Schofield moves into the Le Mesurier home and the marital bed, with John banished to the attic. Yet Stephen Russell's script judges no one as it reveals a marriage that, in its own strange way, was rock-solid, with Hattie and John sharing a lifelong devotion, even after their divorce. Ever the gentleman, John takes the blame for the break-up. Hattie is a touching drama that, for once, doesn't perform a hatchet job on an adored British comedy figure.

Comedy, music and good causes - it can only be the show that makes you laugh until you give.

Harry Hill, Steve Coogan, Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Ant and Dec and Armstrong and Miller are all doing something funny for money this year, along with the casts of The Inbetweeners, Outnumbered and Miranda.

We can also look forward to a specially shot mini-episode of Doctor Who, and James Corden will be back with the third instalment of his iconic Smithy trilogy - calling in favours from some very big names in showbiz.

Corden will also be one fifth of Fake That - a tribute band which boasts the talents of David Walliams, Alan Carr, Catherine Tate and John Bishop.

Never fear, though, the real Take That will be performing too. In fact, the night's going to be awash with boy-bands, as JLS are in the studio and it's The Wanted's turn to do the official Comic Relief single, Gold Forever.

The music line-up also includes chart-busting Adele, Annie Lennox, Elbow and Gareth Malone, who will be trying to turn some TV chefs into a Comic Relief choir.

Your hosts through this comedy marathon will be Davina McCall, Jonathan Ross, Michael McIntyre, Graham Norton, Claudia Winkleman and Fearne Cotton.

There have been 12 Red Nose Days since 1988, helping to raise more than £500million to help needy people in the UK and abroad.

There'll also be films from David Tennant, Jack Dee, Ruth Jones and Comic Relief stalwart Lenny Henry, each providing frequent reminders of how your money can help change people's lives for the better.

Hattie review

It was the central performances that were special. Ruth Jones is more beautiful than Hattie Jacques was, but otherwise she was just right.

In Hattie, Hattie Jacques (Ruth Jones) looked like she might be about to tell This Is Your Life host Eamonn Andrews to get stuffed, before composing herself and affecting modesty: "Oh Eamonn, they don't come much duller than me." Ha ha. What Andrews didn't know was that Jacques had just changed the man in the marital bed, despatching husband John Le Mesurier upstairs and summoning down their lodger.

No one knew this, This Is Your Life passed off without scandal, and in the divorce court, to protect Jacques, Le Mesurier pretended to have been the adulterer. "Thank you for ending our lovely marriage so beautifully," she said.

What a story! How civilised and quietly heroic and terribly British. Well, Le Mesurier was, anyway. The drama gave us nothing of Le Mesurier the actor and not very much of Jacques the actress.

Eric Sykes, in the run-up to BBC4's latest squint under the greasepaint of the great showbiz era, had complained about this.

But Hattie wasn't a sensationalist piece, just sad and moving and told in the usual Beeb 4 way with one classic car (the E-Type Jag driven by the fancy man, not his own), period lampshades, a fug of cigarette smoke, skinny ties, a dollop of casual sexism, a couple of old choons and, of course, a good script and some cracking acting.

Jones did that remarkable thing of making you forget all about her best-known role (Gavin and Somebody) but Robert Bathurst as Le Mesurier was even better, perfectly capturing his vagueness.

Swift production of the martini decanter solved most of his crises, although for having to tell his sons he was finally leaving he tried this sweetener: "I've got you both... pen knives."

I cheered when he remarried Jacques' friend Joan, completely forgetting that the latter's subsequent affair with Tony Hancock had been the subject of a previous Beeb 4 biopic. Pass the martini, old bean.

Hattie DVD review

Ruth Jones' version of Jacques still comes out of this being as difficult to dislike as the real Hattie was.

Has there ever been a more passive and diffident Englishman than John Le Mesurier? Last time he was dramatised was in a film about his best friend Tony Hancock, in which he stood politely by as Hancock ran off with Le Mesurier's third wife. Now he turns up in Hattie (BBC4) as Hattie Jacques's cuckolded husband (she was his second wife). Jacques - played in an exceptional performance by Ruth Jones - took in her used-car salesman lover as a lodger, and maintained a secret affair by the cunning means of slipping upstairs during the middle of the night. The scene in which she was finally discovered by Le Mesurier (a perfectly cast Robert Bathurst) in bed with her lover was a vision of tragicomic poignancy. He apologised for intruding and explained with consummate resignation that he was looking for his book - a James Bond novel. Seldom has the distance between reality and fantasy been so economically or movingly captured.

Well, who'd have thought it of Hattie Jacques. According to BBC4's latest showbiz biopic Hattie, the celebrated comedienne, played by Ruth Jones, conducted quite a carry on of her own back in the sixties. Married to the actor John Le Mesurier, Jacques took a lover ten years her junior and proceeded to move him into the family home as their lodger. Upon discovering the infidelity, Le Mesurier declined the invitation to move out, choosing instead to swap his bed for that of the boyfriend and become cuckold/lodger in his own house. A bizarre compromise that satisfied no-one.

As always with BBC4 biopics, the period was beautifully recreated and the performances top notch, but I never came close to comprehending the characters' behaviour. Nor did I like any of them, although Jones' worked hard to show Jacques charming side. Perhaps Hattie can best be understood and appreciated as a triangular love story fuelled by selfishness, shallowness and cowardice. Not a bundle of laughs, it must be said, but gripping in its own warped way.

Last Night's TV: Hattie/BBC4

Ruth Jones played Jacques, a piece of casting that on paper may have seemed to make sense physically, but didn't entirely in practice.

It takes a special kind of love to move into the lodger's room in the attic while your wife makes hay with her fancy man in the master bedroom. But that was the peculiar domestic set-up at the conflicted heart of Hattie, the true - yes, true - story of Carry On comedy legend Hattie Jacques.

Ruth Jones certainly looked the part of Jacques, all twinkly eyes and comfortable cleavage, her sunny smile masking the frustration of a career cul-de-sac. 'I know my casting; I'm the frigid fat girl,' she complained, acknowledging her role as the nation's favourite chubby, a 1960s Dawn French, if you like.

But though she gave a good impression of warmth, Jones's Hattie strayed a touch too close to heartless bitch for this remarkable story to fully convince. The heart of the tale belonged to wronged husband John Le Mesurier, played by Robert Bathurst with just the right measure of unqualified love and ruffled dignity. 'He's too vague to be unhappy,' claimed Hattie, granting herself licence to cheat, but Bathurst's nuanced performance turned Le Mesurier's vagueness into a self-protective shield.

As a period piece Hattie worked superbly, its glimpses of Carry On film sets, with Marcia Warren scene-stealing as an embittered bit-parter ('I'm sick of this batty old lady s***') a diverting treat. But we didn't get enough of the self-esteem issues that bedevilled Jacques and led her to jeopardise a happy marriage by falling for a devilishly handsome wheeler dealer who made her squeal between the sheets. She fell rather too easily.

Desperate Romantic Aiden Turner certainly looked the part, all moody scowl and hairy chest, but his gor-blimey accent was comedy working class. 'I'm not a bit of rough!' he exploded but that's exactly how he came across, fine for a lusty leg-over but hardly a prospective long-term partner. Which was why Hattie kept her husband in the house to talk to, during the intervals between the sex olympics.

As I said, peculiar. It fell apart when Le Mesurier met a new love, though everyone remained remarkably civilised, and Hattie's bit of rough ultimately left her. It was all quietly sad and a noble attempt to tell a tricky tale. But I never quite fell for it.