Stephanie Cole

Radio Times review

Mrs Featherstone, perpetually dressed in her widow's weeds and a joyless, soul-sucking presence, knows a few things about life: "There's all this fuss about orgasm, but watching your money grow is all the excitement a body needs." It's a great line, made mighty by the magnificent Stephanie Cole.

Elsewhere there's a boob gag within the opening seconds as young Leroy admires the cleavage of one of the many women who crowd his life. His dad Granville (David Jason) is similarly rapt, though of course his gaze was elsewhere: "I liked her hair..."

Throw in some comedy business with a stepladder and one of the Chuckle Brothers and it could be any time between the 1920s and the 1970s.

Radio Times review

Still Open All Hours is a comedy arcadia, with jokes about "the wife", women in nighties, barmaids of easy virtue and unruly umbrellas. It has a curiously ageless feel too - its men wear ties and jumpers, like dads did in the 1950s, there are battleaxe women, and there's no sign of new technology. The world of that northern corner shop exists entirely in its own gently nostalgic bubble.

In the second episode of the new series, tight-fisted retail king Granville (David Jason) resorts to desperate measures to lure in a man who always conspicuously gives the shop a miss as he heads for the Co-Op. He's still trying to secure quality romantic time with his adored Mavis, and he gets a strange proposition from Mrs Featherstone (the magnificent Stephanie Cole).

Radio Times review

For a while it looked as if Man Down might not return. Greg Davies' splendidly daft sitcom about a blundering oaf who is the victim of bizarre attacks from his father, looked in doubt when Rik Mayall - who played said father brilliantly - died in June 2014.

Without Mayall's injections of crazed comic energy the show won't be quite the same, but this Christmas one-off should give us an idea of how much he'll be missed. It was still being made as RT went to press but the plot involves Dan and his two friends - off-with-the-fairies Jo and brilliantly square Brian - visiting the farm of Dan's aunt Nesta (Stephanie Cole). There they meet a peculiarly mean turkey.

A Christmas instalment of Greg Davies's sitcom ahead of a full new series next year, though one that will be sadly missing the late Rik Mayall among its cast. Dan (Davies) has had a tough 12 months, but he's trying to turn things around. A festive thorn in the side, however, threatens to derail his efforts with the unwelcome arrival of his Aunt Nesta (Stephanie Cole). Meanwhile, Jo and Brian have realised rather sooner than expected that a farm is really not their natural habitat.

What I see in the mirror: Stephanie Cole

'I don't have much vanity but, just occasionally, seeing yourself in a shop window can be debilitating'

Light relief in the dreary first full working week of the year came from the return of Cabin Pressure to Radio 4. One of the station's few contemporary sitcom successes (more on that subject another week), it has lured Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Allam back for a fourth run at playing odd-couple pilots Martin and Douglas. The pair man MJN Air: a tinpot, one-plane budget airline owned by middle-aged divorcee Carolyn, played by Stephanie Cole. It's an impressive cast - Allam does a great line in supercilious grumps and he is in his element as the snarky first officer to Cumberbatch's prissy, uptight captain. But perhaps the real star of the show is its writer John Finnemore, who also plays Carolyn's doofus air-steward son, Arthur.

"The code red is there to stop me being too helpful, and I can't stop being too helpful by being more helpful," he bumbled at his mum, in a script packed tight with superb lines. The crew had assembled for Birling Day, the annual jolly enjoyed by their stupidly rich (and often drunk) regular customer, who charters a flight each year to take him to see the Six Nations rugby final. Except this year, the match was taking place at Twickenham, a short drive from Birling's own house. No matter.

After a row with his wife and in a fit of pique, Birling ordered a trip to watch the match in Timbuktu. Miles of daft behaviour followed, the highlight being Allam's smug laugh - "Madame is a humourist?" - as Douglas bartered with Carolyn over a bottle of whisky.

Hurray! Here's the fourth series of John Finnemore's splendid comedy made magical by the brilliance of its cast. Stephanie Cole plays Carolyn Knapp-Shappey, formidable owner of a one-plane airline. Benedict Cumberbatch is the sole Captain, Roger Allam as First Officer provides a one-man masterclass in timing and Finnemore himself plays the owner's cheerfully hapless son. There's enough here to banish the New Year blues, even if your electricity bill just arrived.

Cabin Pressure is one of the best written, cast, acted and directed comedies on anywhere.

Although only radio can make us picture exactly the single old plane on which this little airline depends, only John Finnemore's pen plus the sublime talents of Stephanie Cole, Roger Allam, Anthony Head and Anna Crilly could, last Friday, raise a salutary barrier between the turbulent real world on either side of their glorious fiction. Produced and directed, brilliantly, by David Tyler for independents Pozzitive.

Another new episode of a refined sitcom that bathes in a ridiculously good cast: alongside writer John Finnemore are Stephanie Cole, Benedict Cumberbatch and the man I refer to simply as 'The Guvnor', Roger Allam. This one's a bit special, boasting as it does the sort of tricksy, quadruple-crossing story that comedy writers often like to attempt but don't usually have the sheer plotting muscle to pull off. Finnemore has those chops. When Carolyn (Cole) entrusts Martin (Cumberbatch) to stop Douglas (The Guvnor) stealing some expensive whisky, a mystery worthy of Miss Marple unfurls. Sadly, Martin's investigating it instead.

I must admit that this is the first time I've listened to Cabin Pressure, despite all of the reviews and praise that has been lauded on it.

For those who, like me, still haven't got around to listening, this show is about MJN Air, the world's smallest airline, managed by Carolyn (Stephanie Cole) and flown by Captain Martin Crieff (Benedict Cumberbatch) alongside First Officer Douglas Richardson (Roger Allam). The service on the plane is provided by Carolyn's over-enthusiastic son Arthur (played by John Finnemore, who also writes the show).

The first episode of the third series saw MJN flying some people to Qikiqtarjuaq (near the North Pole) to look at polar bears, which got Arthur both excited and annoyed - excited about the bears, and annoyed about that none of the Q's in "Qikiqtarjuaq" are followed by a "U".

Elsewhere, the highlight for the show for me was Douglas making an announcement to the passengers while smuggling in as many Alfred Hitchcock references as possible. Also, Douglas forces Martin to pretend to be French and recount to the plane how he fought off a polar bear using nothing except an egg whisk and a pogo stick.

Having listened to the show I feel slightly ashamed by the fact that I missed the first two series and now feel a desperate need to catch up - which I'll have to do at some point in the future when I'm not writing these reviews.