Sue Johnston

Review: The Man in the White Suit (Wyndham's Theatre)

There are a lot of good intentions powering Sean Foley's adaptation of the Ealing comedy classic The Man in the White Suit towards the stage. But rather like its hero Stanley's experiments to invent an indestructible fabric that never needs washing, it blows up in everyone's face, leaving a lot of fine actors, including its star Stephen Mangan, lying wounded in the process.

Weirdy-beardy panel show regular Joe Wilkinson co-writes (with David Earl) and stars in this new three-part sitcom set on the Isle of Wight, a relatively untapped comedic setting. He plays Simon, nervously preparing to celebrate his 40th birthday by taking his girlfriend Donna (Diane Morgan) back to his childhood home to meet his daffy mum (Sue Johnston) and overbearing stepdad (Bobby Ball), unaware that his biological father (Nigel Havers) is also keen to elbow in on the fun.

Review: Death On The Tyne, Christmas Gold

It was pretty brave of Gold to schedule this one-off film on primetime on a Saturday night in the run-up to Christmas. But then the channel had reason to be ambitious. Their previous all-star Agatha Christie spoof starring Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson, Murder on the Blackpool Express, was the highest-ever rating show on Gold. They will be hoping for the same here. And they might just get it.

Death On The Tyne preview

Gold is primarily a reruns channel, so it's no surprise that its big commission is slightly old-fashioned in feel.

Death on the Tyne, Gold, review

Another crude, silly and very funny outing.

I'd been looking forward to Rovers. Anyone who loved The Royle Family would have been similarly interested to see it as it promised us a comedy about the dreary lives of the working classes, re-uniting Dave and Barbara (Craig Cash as Pete and Sue Johnston as Doreen), but it's there that comparisons with The Royle Family, or with any other decent comedy, have to end.

Rovers was a disappointment. Perhaps it's just a very gentle comedy, which seems to be the trend just now with recent BBC sitcoms such as Boomers and Mum. But are such shows "gentle" or just not particularly funny?

Rovers should have found it hard to be gentle, being set amid the northern English working class, whose lives seem to have been drained of all colour except the blue of their football team. This scenario should offer lavish opportunity for political comment and scathing observations - but there were none, unless we count a local woman who'd been "sloshing it about" and shamelessly wheeled her resultant "black baby" around a carpet showroom.

But Harry Enfield did this with his Wayne and Waynetta Slob characters in the 1990s, when Waynetta professed a need for "a little brown baby" so she could acquire imagined spectacular benefits from the council. There was little that was new in Rovers. Even its theme, melancholy brass band music, the nostalgic soundtrack of northern England, seemed pinched from Corrie.