Sally Phillips

Series two continues, with Dan (Tom Stourton) given an enlightening vision of a future without the rule of his maniacal mother, thanks to a visit from his feckless Aunt Leslie (the excellent Sally Phillips), who teaches him that he can get anything he wants from society without giving anything in return. Meanwhile, after the delivery of six unordered pizzas, Hannah (Charlotte Ritchie) believes that she's entered a "golden week", a rarified era when lucky breaks will continue to flow liberally.

Radio Times review

It's a terrible sitcom this. Obscene, shallow, full of unpleasant characters. But from its evil comic stew moments always bubble up that make you splutter with a sort of guilty laughter.

This episode sees the reappearance of our siblings' mother (Stella Gonet) and, in a new development, their hippie aunt Leslie (Sally Phillips), who takes a shine to doofus Dan. But as ever the best scenes belong to Charlotte Ritchie as his heartless sister Hannah, who believes she is at last having a Golden Week when everything goes right. It builds to a heroically tasteless climax as she appears in an R&B video while sweating more than the part strictly demands.

Talking to Strangers: Sally Phillips and Lily Bevan

Tired of being asked to play Latvian prostitutes, Sally Phillips and Lily Bevan have come up with their own characters.

How we made Smack the Pony

Sally Phillips, actor: 'I was afraid it would be so awful that no woman would ever be allowed on television again'

Cluub Zarathustra: where British comedy was reborn

The cult comedy night that launched the careers of Simon Munnery, Stewart Lee, Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips and others is 20 years old.

Radio Times review

Series nine of what must be Radio 4's longest-currently-running sitcom begins with Clare (the superb Sally Phillips) arriving late for a meeting with her fellow social workers at Sparrowhawk Family Centre. Which is rather odd, as she's supposed to be on honeymoon at the time.

She's remaining tight-lipped as to why she left her long-suffering partner Brian (Alex Lowe) at the airport while he enjoyed a nibbling-fish foot spa. But as he decided to continue on the holiday - it is full board and non-refundable, so it's a shame to waste it - we get to hear his side of the story when numbs the minds of his fellow holiday-makers and locals with the details.

It provides a complementary storyline to the travails of the social workers back home, and includes a hilarious turn from Nina Conti as a shrill holiday rep intent only on relaying information about a series of increasingly bizarre day trips.

Meanwhile, Clare is having to contend with an elderly Mrs Magoo character on the Sparrowhawk Estate, who is convinced that she will die that day - as her visual sight has diminished so her second sight has improved, apparently. Hannah Gordon is virtually unrecognisable as the batty old dear.

If you haven't listened before - and if not, where have you been for the past ten years? - Clare in the Community walks a fine line between silly, scatological humour and nuanced satire of government do-gooders who know all the current jargon but nothing of people's everyday concerns.

Crackanory was an adult version of the children's storytelling show Jackanory, which I remember from my own 1960s boyhood as a cue to go upstairs and lick the paint off my lead soldiers. This, though, was inspired, featuring Jack Dee being glum and Sally Phillips twinkling with irony, each taking the armchair to tell a story illustrated with filmed action and bits of animation.

The narratives - one a modern fable about a man who idly tweeted something about a pop star and wished he hadn't, the second a twisted tale about a genius toymaker who died and had himself stuffed so that his family could enjoy him staring at them at dinner - were fun, engaging and highly crafted. Nice one, Dave, I felt like saying.

Sitting down and listening to someone read you a story. How long is it since you did that? Not since you were a kid, I'll bet. But that's what Crackanory, the belated grown-up follow-up to children's favourite Jackanory, is asking us to do.

It seems an oddly perverse choice of revival in this age of multitasking, e-readers and texting while you're eating your dinner and listening to your iPod all at the same time. Slowing right down and listening to someone else talk at you: that requires you chill that pulse rate right down.

But it's worth the effort. The opening double bill of slightly twisted short stories repaid giving them your proper attention. As Jack Dee told topical tale Bitter Tweet, a barbed attack on social media manipulation that featuring a hapless bloke called 'Dazpants80' crossing tweets with singing fringe Joaquin Blieber, it was simply impossible not to be pulled into this sharply drawn world.

True, there were some concessions to a modern audience; it wasn't just Dee sat in an armchair. There were some simple dramatised sequences - Dazpants80 finding himself a prisoner in his pub - and a few animated distractions to soften the blow of simply listening.

But for the most part, this was Dee as storyteller, delivering the lines of writer Nico Tatarowicz. It felt like a comforting throwback to a simpler age, which was rather odd, given the subject matter.

The second story, Toby Davies's What Peebee Did Next, told with a knowing tongue in her cheek by Sally Phillips, was more of a throwback to the old Jackanory, albeit with a gruesome sense of humour.

The story of a toymaker who left his happy family an unusual bequest, it had the ring of a Grimm fairy tale, a moral homily popping up to save the day at the 11th hour. At least I felt like I'd had a beginning, middle and end. Some five-season dramas don't deliver that.

Are you sitting comfortably? The Jackanory format receives a post-watershed polish. Turning the pages of tonight's inaugural storybooks are Jack Dee and Sally Phillips, with tales involving a bumbling berk unthinkingly invoking a social media Twitstorm, and a toymaker deciding that death need not prevent quality time with his increasingly uneasy family. Dee's faux-weary cynicism and Phillips's knowing exuberance might leave you hankering for the comforting tones of a Cribbins or Rushton, but a rare chance to enjoy some warmingly lo-fi television.

Updating children's storytelling classic Jackanory for 21st-century grown-ups, TV stars take turns to sit in a big, soft armchair and demonstrate the enduring allure of the spoken word.

Screened in pairs, tonight's brace of comedy shorts opens with Jack Dee, whose deadpan sarcasm is a perfect match for Bitter Tweet, an internet fable following the fate of a Twitter addict followed by Sally Phillips, whose pert delivery is equally well matched to What Peebee Did Next, a tale about toys, grief and taxidermy.