Stephen Graham (I)

TV preview: Decline And Fall, BBC1

Well we've gone back to the 1970s this week, we might as well go the whole hog and go back to the 1920s with this three-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel. And talking of hogs, we've barely been a minute into the action when the chumps from Oxford's riotous Bollinger Club have lobbed a pig's head out of the window into the quad.

In this reduced era of four-parters instead of six, it can seem as if only two actors are in regular work: Stephen Graham and Olivia Colman. She appears in so many serious roles (last week, Accused) that I wonder if there's an entire audience which is unaware she also works often, and brilliantly, in comedy. This is a spoof melodrama about a mining dynasty.

Olivier Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne turns his hand to TV comedy tonight, with this one-off special about a close-knit Birkenhead family who decide to pull out the stops and go to Lapland for Christmas. It stars the excellent Sue Johnston - best known as Barbara Royle from The Royle Family - as the family's benevolent matriarch, Eileen; with support from a strong ensemble cast, including Elizabeth Berrington (Waterloo Road) as her overstressed daughter Paula and Stephen Graham (This Is England) as her long-suffering son Pete. Being a British comedy, it doesn't take long for the infighting to start, and the film contains a handful of smartly observed scenes that will be familiar to many viewers - from the grandmother being used as a permanently on-call nanny by her own children, to the simmering family grievances vented after a few glasses of sherry, to the difficulty of keeping older siblings from spoiling the magic of Father Christmas for their younger brothers and sisters. At points, this takes the programme more into the realm of edgy, Shameless-style drama than gentle festive comedy; but Wynne manages to sugar the pill with a good deal of warm Northern humour.

Interview: Stephen Graham from BBC comedy Lapland

An interview with actor Stephen Graham.

Sue Johnston: 'Reindeer tastes like filet steak!'

Sue Johnston talks about her new Christmas comedy Lapland and what it's like playing This is England star Stephen Graham's mum...