Samantha Spiro

The fact that actor Geoffrey Hutchings sadly died in 2010 after the first series of this sitcom was made has been worked in gently, as the absence of his character, Grandpa, ripples through the plot. It affects Grandma most, wonderfully played by Linda Bassett. Her desperate refusal to acknowedge emotion - often changing the subject to offer someone fruit - is becoming more extreme. Last week we learnt that she has taken to stealing china pandas from friends' houses.

This week, things get worse as the marital problems of her daughter, the brilliantly horrible Auntie Liz, threaten to engulf the family. ("Do you want a melon?" quavers Grandma, desperately.) That gives scope for Samantha Spiro as Liz to chart the range of her hilariously shifty, two-faced character. It's her finest hour yet, a cringe-making masterclass, and very funny.

Simon Amstell's sharp Jewish sitcom in which he plays a slightly skewed version of himself continues to charm. In tonight's thoroughly farcical episode Simon plans on taking newly kleptomaniac Grandma (Linda Bassett) to see a counsellor before heading off on a date. Things go awry when a bumbling Clive (James Smith) turns up and makes a confession about an entanglement with Liz (Samantha Spiro).

Series two goes up a gear when the superb Vincent Franklin arrives as Barry, husband of ratty aunt Liz (Samantha Spiro). Barry has mucus and a morbid obsession with rolling news, but he also has a flat in London that Simon Amstell (Simon Amstell) wants to borrow.

Barry fits right in as another source of tension that can't quite be smothered by domestic ritual. His pomposity is a good counterpoint to Clive (James Smith), who's getting more vulnerable, stuck in the loft fixing a leak. Clive emerges at the end for a tremendous comic pay-off.

Rebecca Front has fun tonight as Simon Amstell's potty-mouthed mother Tanya in this sharply observed sitcom. A reconciliation with her sister Liz (Samantha Spiro) turns sour when Liz's mucus-ridden husband wavers on whether to let Simon borrow his flat in Soho. Much of the comedy revolves around a stash of pornography uncovered in the attic but it is the brilliant characterisation of toxic family relationships that brings in most of the laughs.

The second series of Simon Amstell's meta comedy takes it up a notch by introducing a new fictional comedy show written by Simon, about his family. The farcical elements remain sharp, as Simon wakes up next to a man who insists on referring to him only as Simon Amstell, and the supporting cast is impeccable, particularly Samantha Spiro's angry aunt and Rebecca Front as Amstell's mother: "You're back on telly!" she beams. "I don't care if it's absolute shit."

Simon Amstell's dysfunctional family sitcom, Grandma's House, returns for another run of gently serrated farce, in which the lapsed tormentor of pop buffoons plays an undisguised version of himself struggling to escape from his abrasive public image.

Last time he was trying to achieve something more meaningful with his life and craft - in reality, of course, he made Grandma's House - and as we reconvene he's finally been given a self-penned TV pilot. Which sounds a lot like Grandma's House. His proudly forthright Jewish mother - played by the great Rebecca Front - is naturally delighted, especially since Simon's career slump means he now lives in grandma's box room. "I can feel the shame lifting, can you?" she beams.

Like a more populous variation on Roger and Val Have Just Got In, each episode unfolds entirely within the titular abode, with the intensely self-aware Simon a perpetually mortified victim of his family's eccentricity. As before it's all very likeable, witty and controlled and Amstell has thankfully improved as an actor following a painfully self-conscious start during the first series. Indeed, they've developed his shortcomings into a running gag within the show itself - episode one is titled "The day Simon officially became a very good and totally employable actor."

The death of actor Geoffrey Hutchings, who played Simon's granddad in the first series, is deftly handled (you won't find overbearing schmaltz in this show), with his absence quietly underpinning an otherwise typically chucklesome episode in which our discomfited protagonist deals with the fall-out from a one night stand and fails to mend a possibly symbolic leak.

If I have a criticism it's that Samantha Spiro as Simon's embittered aunt is still too broad at times, although James Smith - coincidentally Front's co-star in The Thick Of It - continues to judge his performance perfectly as mum's hopeless ex-fiancée. Also, apropos motherly concern, a brief topless scene reveals that Amstell has the body of an emaciated alien. Eat, man, eat!

The late John Sullivan's prequel to Only Fools and Horses staggers on to 1962 with Del and Rodney's mum, Joan (Kellie Bright managing to be both sassy and naive), holding down two jobs to keep the Trotter family going. Meanwhile, Rodney's biological dad and smooth criminal Freddie Robdal (Nicholas Lyndhurst) is being hounded by DI Thomas (Mel Smith at his jowly best) for the Margate jewellery heist, and young Del (James Buckley) has got engaged to a posh bird called Barbara. Samantha Spiro and Alex MacQueen give wonderfully over-the-top, cartoon-like performances as the up-market Birds. The disdainful yet bewildered expression on their faces when they hear that Del's dad is a docker is akin to that of Downton Abbey's Maggie Smith when she enquired exactly what a weekend is. But, despite these moments, most of this is clunky and charmless. And lovely Lambrettas and Golden Egg restaurant aside, some of the period detail is strangely unconvincing. Yet audiences have loved earlier outings. An enduring nostalgia for the Trotters maybe.

Radio Times review

The most unfairly criticised comedy of the year, with sages queuing up to make the shattering observation that Simon Amstell can't act. Why would he need to? He was playing himself in a sitcom about a comedian who, despite considerable success, is paralysed by neuroses and has no communication skills, especially when stuck with his brash, unstarry relatives. Mumbling and nearly corpsing worked for Jerry Seinfeld and were what was required here.

Amstell's merciless dissection of his own personality gave Grandma's House its real-com edge, but more importantly, it had a fabulous cast (Rebecca Front, Samantha Spiro, James Smith) enjoying a script full of spiky but affectionate family ding-dongs, in a Royles/Gavin & Stacey vein. When the later episodes introduced classic sitcom plotting - intricate, chaotic, accelerating - Grandma's House got even better.

It was a curate's egg of a half-hour, not that a curate and his egg offer the best metaphor for a show about a loving but bickering family of east London Jews. In fact, it is a singularly ill-fitting metaphor, the expression "curate's egg" originating in the old Punch cartoon about a curate who was too timid to complain about a bad egg he had been served. There would be no such timidity at any table of Jews worth their salt beef. Even a visiting rabbi would spit out such an egg.

Enough eggs already. Grandma's House revolves around the simple idea, one that dates back almost to the birth of television comedy, of different generations of the same family arguing in a front room. Steptoe and Son did it to great effect, so did Til Death Us Do Part, so did The Royle Family. In some ways, Grandma's House is The Royle Family with chopped liver. In other ways, it is Seinfeld removed to Gants Hill. And the nod to Seinfeld is evident in the character of Simon (Simon Amstell), the presenter of a TV comedy panel show about music, which - just as Jerry Seinfeld played a stand-up comedian called Jerry, a mildly fictionalised version of himself - is precisely what Amstell, the co-writer of Grandma's House with Dan Swimer and erstwhile presenter of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, is in real life. Or was. Indeed, in last night's opening episode Simon announced to his family his intention to quit his TV show, much to their dismay. "In my kalooki group that's all we talk about," lamented his grandma (Linda Bassett).

The other obvious parallel with Seinfeld is that Jerry Seinfeld made it through nine seasons of that phenomenally successful show rarely ever being more than engagingly wooden as an actor. Good acting was the preserve of his brilliant co-stars and so it is here. Amstell barely seems to try to act, just issues his lines semi-mechanically wearing a half-smile, just as Jerry did.

Still, it didn't matter in Seinfeld and, strangely, it doesn't matter here either. Amstell, aided by the sensible decision not to run a laughter-track, somehow makes a virtue of his self-consciousness, and in any case, there are enough pitch-perfect performances, notably from Rebecca Front playing Simon's divorced mother, Tanya, and Samantha Spiro as his aunt, Liz. It helps that the writing, too, is often pitch-perfect. Tanya is being courted by Clive (James Smith), whom Simon loathes, but who is considered highly eligible largely on account of a 42-inch plasma TV on which "you can see every hair of Noel Edmonds's beard". And when Simon's grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) breaks the news that he has cancer (an unwittingly poignant detail, given that Hutchings died suddenly last month), it is questioned on the basis that "years ago he found a lump on his testicle and it was a raisin in his pants".

Just as a wandering raisin can be mistaken for a testicular lump, so can a promising first episode be mistaken for a good new sitcom, and I wouldn't like to commit myself too soon. Besides, there are reasons why London-Jewish humour is far less familiar to us than the kind of New York-Jewish humour exemplified by Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Larry David (whose Curb Your Enthusiasm also has loud echoes in Grandma's House). It is no accident that the Jewish humour British audiences know best and love most has historically been imported, mordant and razor-sharp, from the United States. Nor is it any accident that Jewish characters in British sitcoms are, for the most part, pretty forgettable. It is more than 40 years since Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, and not even the warm glow of nostalgia does it any favours.

Simon Amstell's decision to quit as host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks was just about worthy of a few column inches within the showbiz pages of The Sun and the Daily Mirror, but its own sitcom? Apparently so... The opening scene of the sarky comedian's first stab at situation comedy sees him being berated by his family for ditching his lucrative line in insulting pop stars. It seems upsetting Preston from The Ordinary Boys pays the mortgage.

It has to be said that acting isn't exactly Simon's strong point, since he struggles to portray even a convincing version of Simon Amstell. While a fine cast including seasoned humourists like Rebecca Front (The Thick of It) as Simon's mum and Linda Bassett (East is East) as his Grandma put in fantastically accomplished performances, to say that the former Popworld host looked a little out of sorts is something of an understatement.

With all of this self-referencing and ham-fisted stabs at acting, I was expecting to loathe Grandma's House, but it's actually rather good, with some decent gags and - apart from Mr Amstell - a genuinely brilliant cast. Other topics covered in the series opener included the facial hair issues of Auntie Liz (Samantha Spiro) - easily resolved with a roll of Sellotape, it seems; Grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) suspecting he has "cancer" (he's peeing a lot); and best of all, mum Tanya's buffoon of a new boyfriend Clive, a barnstorming performance from The Thick of It's James Smith.

All in all the Grandma's House opener offered up more than enough laughs to merit tuning in next week, but one wonders whether it might not be improved with someone else in the lead role. Next time, Simon, cast someone else as yourself.