Stephanie Cole

Here's a diamond in radio's crown, John Finnemore's comedy about a small airline. He plays Arthur, daft son of Carolyn the doughty owner (Stephanie Cole, funny and sharp here in a role that suits her perfectly, unlike the ghastly one she struggles with in Coronation Street). Roger Allam and Benedict Cumberbatch play (superbly) the first officer and pilot who fly the plane. Today they're off to a little place called Qikigtarjuag, with a party of tourists who want to look at polar bears. Group leader Nancy rubs Carolyn up the wrong way. She'll be sorry!

Stephanie Cole and David Ryall star in the last of a quartet of plays (each by a different writer) about grown-up children who (for various and recognisable reasons) still live at home. This one's by Alexander Kirk, about a skinflint son and a more impulsive mum. Each has been interesting, sometimes touching and remarkable for showcasing the impressive range of acting talent among Britain's older actresses.

Stephanie Cole to join Coronation Street cast

Actress Stephanie Cole is set to tread the cobbles of Coronation Street playing Roy Cropper's mother, the ITV1 soap's producers have announced. The 69-year-old, famed for her roles in Tenko and Waiting for God, will appear on screen as Sylvie Cropper from March.

Doc Martin (ITV1, Sunday), back for a long-awaited fourth series last night, stars Martin Clunes as a surgeon who is forced to take up a new career as a GP in a Cornish fishing village after he develops hemophobia, a fear of blood so extreme that he turns grey and throws up at the mere sight of the stuff. Funnily enough, I have the same problem with Mr Clunes, and since he's never off our screens for more than a day or two you can imagine the dire implications for my career as a telly critic. He's annoyed me ever since Men Behaving Badly, there was that awful documentary where he slobbered all over dogs, but the last straw was the catastrophic remake of Reggie Perrin.

Still, Dr Martin Ellingham is working very hard to overcome his syndrome, and so am I. Doc Martin is the right place to start because it's pretty damn good: not for nothing did the finale to the third series notch up 10 million viewers. The scripts have a slight tang of nastiness about them - too slight for my tastes, but just occasionally its mockery of the Cornish locals reminds me of the take-no-prisoners humour of Nighty Night. The malevolence mostly emanates from the Clunes character, who is grumpy and sarcastic: that's a blessed relief, because it means that the actor rarely gets to twist his face into the rubbery aw-shucks grin that gets my phobia going.

Anyway, last night's plot revolved around a woman who was wrongly diagnosed with a cyst in her stomach: it turned out to be a diverticular mass. Also, there was a subplot involving the village restaurant owner, played by an actor so grotesquely fat that you felt it was irresponsible of the producers to put him on screen rather than send him off to a real doctor. I'm sure that those impressive layers of lard help him get parts, but is it worth it?

Martin Clunes has put on a few pounds, too - rather disconcertingly so, if you happen to be the same age as him, because it reminds you that the late-20s layabout of Men Behaving Badly is now properly middle-aged. I'm afraid I became rather distracted by his weight in this episode. Why does he always wear three-button suits in his dramas? Doesn't he realise how unflattering they are to the fuller figure? And I sniggered when Ellingham's aunt Joan (Stephanie Cole at her doughty best) dropped off an enormous fruit pie at his surgery. He was supposed to be irritated by the interruption, but it did look delicious and Clunes's eyes lingered a bit too long on the pastry. I shouldn't think he needed much persuasion when the director yelled, "Cut!"

Only on radio, where the listener brings the scenery, can a comedy about a small airline take off so successfully. (I'm a devoted fan of that ultra-camp TV show The High Life, but it only had one series.) This has the setting and characters from which classic sitcoms are built: a struggling business, a canny but inexperienced proprietor (Stephanie Cole), her wily chief pilot (Roger Allam), his ambitious young rival (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the good-hearted but daft son of the boss (John Finnemore, who's also the writer). It's really funny.

Welcome return for John Finnemore's situation comedy about a struggling small charter airline. It's blessed with a classy cast, Roger Allam, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephanie Cole as Carolyn, the boss, and Finnemore himself as her perennially perky son Arthur. And today Alison Steadman arrives as Carolyn's sister. They haven't spoken for years. Arthur hasn't bothered to think about that as he's planned a cheery birthday trip for them all. To Helsinki. He's booked it on his Mum's credit card. And she thought it was proper business.

I gave the show a brief mention a few weeks ago, but now its run has finished, it's time to give Cabin Pressure its due. Its first episode was, I said, flawless. Nothing can be flawless for ever, but the writing and performances in this tight comedy have been exceptional. Let me put it like this: this is the only programme that has kept me close to a radio at 11.30 every Wednesday morning. Never mind Listen Again - you want to catch this as soon as you can.

The setting might be novel - a charter plane, with its skeleton crew of misfits - but the writing obeys pretty much all the necessary rules of classic British sitcom writing, which are simple. In fact, students of the art form would do well to listen to it and take notes. You need little more than an inverted class relationship, a sense of failure, an idiot, and a scary authority figure. What writer John Finnemore has done as well is to add, without tilting things off balance comedy-wise, some depth to the characters.

So the dragon of a boss, played by Stephanie Cole, is revealed to be scared of becoming a 'little old lady'; and the wonderfully supercilious Jeeves/Sergeant Wilson figure, the man who should be Captain but isn't (a perfect performance by Roger Allam), is shown to have weaknesses of his own. The show deserves an award.

John Finnemore's new situation comedy has the benefit of a superb cast. Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole and Benedict Cumberbatch give their all to this story of a small charter airline whose single plane is flown by one blasé old know-it-all (Allam) and one fiercely competitive young thruster (Cumberbatch). The whole shebang is owned by a fearsome divorcée (Cole) who has come by the plane in a divorce settlement. Her other inheritance is a dim son (played by the author) whose meek optimism is amply reflected in the laughter from the studio audience.

The fear and joys of flying have been a comedy staple for decades, and every joke it is possible to make has probably been made. The challenge is to tell the old jokes in a new way. So step forward, experienced wordsmith (Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Sound) John Finnemore, with this new six-part sitcom about a one-plane outfit run by an autocratic divorcée (Stephanie Cole, doing her usual posh bully bit).

Her aircraft has two pilots, one a jaded cynic with a dodgy past who can, though, actually fly (played to worldweary perfection by Roger Allam) and one who seemed to have got his wings through a correspondence college (Benedict Cumberbatch, showing he can do situation comedy as well as he does everything else in the thesp game).

Chuck in Finnemore himself as Cole's keen but dim son-of-all work, plus an unusually high level of well-researched technical information about flying, and you have a half-hour that flies by (fnaarg fnaarg).