Samantha Spiro

Preview: Tracy Ullman's Show series 2

This week sees the return of Tracy Ullman's Show to BBC One, with the first episode airing on Friday 3rd February at 9:30pm. As with the first series, a bevy of TVO regulars are involved: this time around Dan Skinner, Tracy Ann Oberman, Lucy Montgomery and Laurence Rickard are part of the impressive ensemble cast. But is the end result worth a look? TVO editor Paul Holmes took a sneaky peek...

TV preview: Tracey Ullman's Show, BBC1

By their supporting cast shalt thou know them. Or something. The first episode of the second series of Tracey Ullman's return to British sketch show comedy features an enviable cast list of contemporary comedians and actors.

Due to the promotional clips I watched of Tracey Ullman's Show I expected it to be a sketch show featuring the comedienne performing a number of impressions. However Ullman only impersonated three famous faces with the sketches in which she played acting Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench not feeling particularly original. I certainly didn't find Dench's secret kleptomania or Smith auditioning for sci-fi roles to be that funny and the supposed jokes from these two sketches fell flat. Conversely I felt that Ullman was in her element when portraying German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was on her way to and from a conference in Cardiff. The scenes between Ullman's Merkel and her assistant played by Samantha Spiro were the funniest moments during the half hour as the imagined conversations between the pair felt oddly realistic. In fact I would've loved to have seen a Veep-style sitcom starring Ullman as Merkel as I feel it would've been funnier than about 95% of the sketches here. Everything else Ullman did provoked little laughter from the female MP whose decision to go topless impressed the male electorate to the female beautician who almost set her massage parlour on fire. Even the sketches involving a woman who had been freed from an East Asian Prison after thirty years all featured obvious gags including one scene in which we were delivered a rather sad list of all the iconic British retailers that had shut their doors during her incarceration. Aside from the Merkel material the only other part of Ullman's show that raised more than a titter was the closing satirical song and dance number about the closure of a Welsh library. Unfortunately this finale came a little too late to change my opinion of a sketch show that had plenty of opportunity but didn't really deliver in terms of laughs. Whilst I like Ullman and many of her supporting players I won't be returning to this show again as nothing apart from the Merkel sketches really left an impression.

Ullman's enduring status is evident in her comeback show, with Samantha Spiro, Tony Gardner and Rupert Grint turning out as foils. The credits confirm the former 80s star of Three of a Kind also has the best writing and production team available. But this is not so much hit-and-miss as not-aiming-at-anything-concrete in the first place. Recurring characters, mimicry and light satire all refuse to ignite in a show that doesn't look as if its creator desperately needed to create it.

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.

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.

Samantha Spiro interview

The actor and star of Psychobitches talks about the psychology of Lady Macbeth - and feelings of guilt closer to home.

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.

Step up Psychobitches (Sky Arts 1), which started out as a pilot last year but has now deservedly bloomed into a full series.

The set-up is simple. Rebecca Front, understandably striking while her iron is hot, plays psychiatrist to a succession of celebrity patients - of a decidedly retro vintage - which is basically an excuse for a host of top comic talent to show off in a series of over-the-top impressions.

In the space of 25 minutes or so, everyone from the Brontë Sisters to Margot Fonteyn by way of Nina Simone had a go at hogging the ego-crazed spotlight.

The quality control is variable but when Psychobitches is good, it's very, very good, with Samantha Spiro, a world away from her mousy turn in Grandma's House, absolutely fabulous as an infuriatingly kooky Audrey Hepburn.

Even better was Julia Davis turning chirpy Pam Ayres and tormented Sylvia Plath into a poetic double act, chipper rhymes morphing into angst-ridden soul-searching in the blink of a couplet. Delightfully bonkers.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Psychobitches, Sky Arts 1 new comedy series, is an all-female affair. It isn't, though nobody gets on screen without dragging up, the essential conceit being that the patient list for Rebecca Front's psychotherapist is composed entirely of famous women from history. Some of them have come to do some work on a family relationship, such as the Brontë sisters, bickering furiously in a row on the couch.

Others are working on more private problems, including Audrey Hepburn, who is having difficulty finding the fine line between being charming and infuriating. And it's very funny. As Hepburn, Samantha Spiro is terrific, winsomely inviting Front's weary therapist to play imaginary ping-pong. But Julia Davis is good too as Sylvia Plath, who excitedly confides that she's been experimenting with writing in a different persona: "Oh I wish I'd looked after me toes/ Not treated them like they were foes," she reads perkily, before black despair gradually edges out Pam Ayres.

The writing is often excellent - Charlotte Brontë's furious complaint that her oversexed sister is "frothing like a beck in a storm" seemed oddly plausible - and even the spaces between the sketches are drily funny (Jeremy Dyson directs). But it would be unfair not to give due credit to a performer who could easily get overlooked, since she's the foil and not the funny woman: Rebecca Front gets bigger laughs doing virtually nothing here than some of her co-stars do with a string of punchlines.