Samantha Spiro

Bright Constable Twitten (Matt Green) wants to cheer up poor Sergeant Brunswick (John Ramm) but it's hard going when they're under the command of Inspector Steine (pronounced Steen and played by Michael Fenton Stevens) who can't spot a crime when it's going on in his own nick. As it often is, as their cleaning lady Mrs Groynes (Samantha Spiro) is a criminal mastermind. Enter Harry Jupiter (Philip Jackson), top reporter and Brunswick's idol. You have to be spry to follow the twists in Lynne Truss's cartwheeling comedy.

Lynne Truss's sublime Brighton-set police drama pastiche returns for a six-part run. It's still 1957 and Sgt Brunswick remains the worst undercover operative around, regularly getting shot for his troubles. Yet he's attracted the attention of a tenacious crime reporter who wants to write about the ordinary heroic copper. But what will the Daily Clarion's finest make of an officer with 36 bullet-hole scars who thinks the idea of a criminal records system sounds like "girls' work"? As usual, the period detail and post-war patter impresses, but the whole thing is stolen by cockney-charlady-cum-crooked-mastermind Mrs Groynes (Samantha Spiro) who effortlessly shoehorns in such berserk but perspicacious declarations as, "well all this standing around jawing won't get the Rome Treaty ratified and change the course of European affairs irrevocably and for ever now, will it dears?"

Doug Lucie's play is sharp as a tack. Mike (Mark Bazeley) is a property developer. His wife (Samantha Spiro) presides over their slackly affluent household in which the son lies on the sofa all day (smoking dope, watching porn) and the daughter plans naff weddings. Their Russian au pair Tatiana (Larissa Kouznetsova) seems caught, powerless, in the midst of their multiple demands. But when the property market starts to tremble and topple, it's Tatiana who may hold the key to helping solve their problems. She has this brother, with useful connections.

The return of the cops'n'comedy capers set in Brighton during the 1950s, written by Lynne Truss. When we rejoin the action, crime has ceased on the South Coast; nothing for months while the rest of the country is up to its winkle-pickers and drape jackets in juvenile delinquency. This is because Twitten (Matt Green) the fiercely bright constable, has forced Mrs Groyne (Samantha Spiro) the police station char and secret criminal mastermind, out of business by threatening to reveal her crimes in a letter he has deposited with his solicitor unless she cuts out the criminality.

And so the coppers languish; Twitten works on his book; Inspector Steine (Michael Fenton Stevens), Brighton's answer to Jacques Clouseau, works on his golf; Sergeant Brunswick (John Ramm) infiltrates a string quartet he suspects of being a band of brigands.

It's all engagingly silly, crammed with period detail jammed into the narrative: Well, standing around talking won't get worldwide success for Colin Wilson's unreadable novel The Outsider, says Mrs Groyne, who is much given to such gnomic utterances.