Steve Speirs

Rovers: Premier League line-up puts the fun in footie

It makes sense for a football-themed comedy to air not only in the wake of underdog Leicester City's recent fairytale triumph, but also in the fever-pitch build-up to Euro 2016.

Radio Times review

The Frisky Fox is becoming to Pontyberry what the Queen Vic is to Walford. All human life is here, and anything of import happens within its walls. In this eventful episode the pub hosts a mayoral candidacy vote, an arranged marriage proposition, a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and a Star Trek-themed wake.

Writer Steve Speirs (the sadly absent Big Alan) even makes time for a love triangle for Jag and a get-together for Stella's returning ex, Rob. With further effortless comedy from Di Botcher as Aunty Brenda and a step-up in Strictly fever, it's an enjoyably breezy watch.

Radio Times review

This post-watershed Pobol y Cwm has dawdled a bit lately. That all changes with the return of a Pontyberry favourite. Stella sees a woman loitering in her road, swigging from a vodka bottle. "It can't be." It is: Stella's sister-in-law and best friend Paula (Elizabeth Berrington) - back, she says, to pay the recovering Aunty Brenda a visit. How we, her friends and the show, have missed her.

In spite of an unsavoury storyline for Luke that paints Stella in unnecessarily EastEnder-ish colours (in hock to a loan shark; becoming a male escort), it's a warm and luminous episode, with reunion and resolution, Steve Speirs in Spanx and, perhaps, a subtle nod to Julie Walters's decrepit waitress sketch from As Seen on TV. I suspect that the more you love these characters, the more you'll be dabbing your eyes at several moments.

Radio Times review

Just some of the different ways in which men are idiots seems to be the theme of this episode. First there's imploding lawyer Michael, who has yet to confess to the lovely Stella the full extent of his betrayal with Beyoncé. Then there's flashy car salesman and aspiring councillor Dai Davies, who believes he can woo the electorate with a free bar. Stella's eldest, Luke, thinks a spot of online gambling will fund his new house. And Luke's brother Ben is tongue-tied with infatuation for Lily. See? Idiots.

It's a vibrant romp centred on a historical pageant (Dai seems to turn into Gimli from Lord of the Rings), with another no-nonsense turn from rugby's Scott Quinnell softening the inevitable heartbreak. But often Stella's most memorable scenes are those pertaining to friendship. One taxi confessional between the series' two best characters, Big Alan (Steve Speirs) and Stella (Ruth Jones) is a beauty.

Radio Times review

Ruth Jones's smile of a show returns for a well-won fourth series. As we catch up with the people of Pontyberry, Stella and Michael and their merged families are living in domestic bliss/chaos. So, while a contented Stella (Ruth Jones) heads off to her nursing job, Michael (Patrick Baladi) has to contend with drum 'n' bass and crying infants while practising as a solicitor from home.

Meanwhile, relations are fraught between Big Alan (wonderful Steve Speirs) and his son before the opening night of their risky new venture, Le Café de Les Alans, with Little Alan hurling pans about like a junior Gordon Ramsay.

Stella has survived the exit of key characters by sticking to its golden formula: conveying a real but comically heightened sense of community. Glad to see sweary Mother Hubbard Rhian and Welsh tornado Aunty Brenda still in the thick of the action and stealing many of the best lines.

Radio Times review

It would be tempting to think that the focus of this story is its creator, David Walliams, who was no stranger to rocking a frock in Little Britain and Come Fly with Me. But the comic actor turned children's writer has a serious point to make in this uplifting version of his debut novel.

Our hero is 12-year-old Dennis (Billy Kennedy), who lives with his couch-potato dad and unreconstructed brother. Dennis is missing his mother, who has left home to live with a roofer, but he soon finds an escape.

A gifted footballer, Dennis also discovers through his new friend Lisa (the school's coolest girl), that wearing dresses makes him happy. How will he reconcile his interests, or sneak past his fashion-police teachers?

Walliams's knack of championing the outsider and celebrating difference shines out of a story he says isn't autobiographical, but is "very personal". It's no wonder such a quality cast signed up, including Jennifer Saunders, Tim McInnerny, Steve Speirs and James Buckley, who has some of the best lines as a supremely negative PE teacher. Even supermodel Kate Moss gets to shake a tailfeather, and Walliams allows himself a cameo as a camp referee.

It's a refreshingly unusual Christmas treat with a punch-the-air final act, and a great use of Queen - have a guess which song they use.

Radio Times review

Mr Church and Mr Gunn are locked in their ridiculous competition to win the affections of needy, passive-aggressive school siren Miss Postern. It's her birthday but no one cares, apart from the frenzied Church.

As the second series of David Walliams's school-set sitcom hits its stride, there are more daft gags, but Big School manages not to be sent for detention because of the great cast - Philip Glenister, Catherine Tate, Walliams himself - who throw everything into it.

Some of the jokes go on too long, including a laboured bit of business involving a hunky, blind new geography teacher, and the whole thing is often breathtakingly coarse (a running joke about gay sex, for instance). But Frances de la Tour as the lubricious head steals every scene and it's always good to see Steve Speirs doing his mournful Welsh thing, here as the useless caretaker.

As it returns for a second series, Big School really seems to have found its comedy feet. David Walliams' performance is still every bit as subtle as his cross-dressing "I'm a laydee" Emily was in Little Britain. That is to say, not at all.

But Big School is well enough written to survive his camp, asexual gurning and the dream cast add extra polish to an already shiny script.

In tonight's opener, music teacher Mr Martin (Daniel Rigby) is about to launch his pop career. (His single, written by David Arnold and Michael Price, sounds like an entirely credible X Factor winner's song.)

Mr Barber (Steve Speirs) has had to take a career change, PE teacher Mr Gunn (Philip Glenister) is now also teaching geography, and even the confident Miss Postern (Catherine Tate) finds herself at a crossroads in her career.

In one slightly depressing piece of casting, former EastEnder Cheryl Fergison replaces Julie T Wallace as the wordless lab assistant who has the hots for Walliams' Mr Church. Why depressing? Because making someone the butt of the joke just because they don't look like Angelina Jolie feels uncomfortably like bullying.

But the real reason for Big School's success is probably Frances de la Tour. Even when she's not actually on screen, just knowing that she's lurking somewhere in the building as vinegary headmistress Ms Baron is reassuring.

There are echoes of those shows where they have to hoist 80-stone women out of bed in tonight's visit to Pontyberry. Big Alan (Steve Speirs) tackles the weighty problem of his mum's funeral - weighty being the operative term, as it turns out Big runs in Alan's family. It makes for an affectionately comic departure from the ongoing trauma of Stella's love life - she wouldn't have it any other way.

Viewers have taken to Big School (co-written by David Walliams and the Dawson brothers) in droves and they are rewarded by plenty of these crowd-pleasing moments (come on, who doesn't want to watch Philip Glenister drag David Walliams from a set of wall-bars?). But the real scene-stealer is Steve Speirs (he was Ricky Gervais's unwanted "friend" in Extras) as sentimental, self-dramatising Welsh geography teacher Mr Barber. He's prepared his class for an important exam: "I'm looking for the geography teachers of tomorrow." Or so he thinks.

Meanwhile, Greybridge School is transfixed by rumours that the chemistry department's prissy deputy head Mr Church has slept with thick French teacher Miss Postern. The rumour was started by Cro-Magnon gym teacher Mr Gunn, Miss Postern's other suitor and Mr Church's rival. In a big slapstick set-piece Church and Gunn (Walliams and Glenister) wrestle - literally - for Miss Postern's affections.