Susie Blake

This new sitcom comes from the same writing team that gave us The Worst Week Of My Life, but despite a cast which includes Ricky Tomlinson as the local pub landlord, Great Night Out offers more gentle and much more obvious laughs.

Set in Stockport, it's a male bonding comedy about four ­life-long friends and Stockport County supporters played by William Ash, Lee Boardman, Craig Parkinson and Stephen Walters.

Their not-so-great night out this week finds them in Manchester's posh Midland Hotel attempting to celebrate the fifth wedding ­anniversary of their unofficial leader, Hodge.

The cast, which also includes Susie Blake and Isy Suttie in peripheral roles as well as Jessica Gunning as the Friend From Hell, should provide plenty of material for more misadventures each week. But when the biggest laughs of the episode go not to any of the leads but to a character billed only as Train Attendant, then ­something's gone a bit wrong somewhere.

More family hijinks in this above-average comedy drama about a family of four who are forced to move in with the grandparents. Mother Jenny (the excellent Sally Phillips) gets into a spot of bother when she smokes an old cigarette she finds and leaves the butt in the garden - prompting grandmother Alma (Susie Blake) to blame teenager Becky (Jadie Rose Hobson).

The sitcom about "boomerang children" - adults who move back in with their parents - continues. When Jenny (Sally Phillips) stumbles across an old diary from her school days, feelings of resentment towards her mother Alma (Susie Blake) resurface. In a fit of 25-year-late teenage rebellion, she smokes a fossilised cigarette she finds inside the diary. Elsewhere, there are suspicions of an extra-marital affair.

Sky1's penchant for overly gentle, family friendly sitcoms continues with one starring Sally Phillips. She plays Jenny, a mum who is forced, along with her husband and children, to move back in with her parents (Susie Blake and Tom Conti), where, suffice to say, they're not particularly wanted.

Sky 1's comedy firmly plants a flag on Modern Family territory with its crowd-pleasing farcical mix of hip oldsters, dippy parents and cool kids.

It most emphatically isn't Modern Family, of course; it's more like a lighter version of BBC1's My Family with its infantile mum and dad: Jenny (Sally Phillips) who loses her job and Nick (Darren Strange), the latest in a long line of hapless sitcom dads, a deluded pin brain with lame ideas about being an "entrepreneur".

As the family finances suffer and their house is repossessed, they have to move in with granny and grandad (Susie Blake and Tom Conti). The comedy catch is that the grandparents really don't want them and treat everyone, adults included, like kids. Just in case there's anything here you don't get, the whole premise is helpfully set out in the animated opening titles.

If the opening episode of Lloyd Woolf and Joe Tucker's family comedy doesn't exactly sparkle, it shows some promise and boasts a good cast. When Jenny Pope (Sally Phillips) is fired from her high-profile job for fighting with a colleague, the family home is repossessed, so Jenny, husband Nick (Darren Strange) and their two children have to move in with her parents, Len (Tom Conti) and Alma (Susie Blake) in Kettering. However, it seems that Len and Alma, although accommodating, are not so willing to give up their daily routine.

Probably the only sitcom this year in which episode titles are carried off by binmen, letters are dictated with soundtrack and effects, and epic battles of good and evil are waged by gas salesmen, House of Rooms is a pleasingly off-kilter affair with lo-fi charm to burn. Jones the writer and performer has the rare gift of being appealing quirky without apparently trying too hard, while Cordelia Bugeja is adorable and faintly sinister as Milton's tongue-tied object of desire. Susie Blake (aged up convincingly as Milton's mum) and Alexander Kirk (as weirdo tenant Tony) round out an impressive cast of oft-unappreciated performers in one Comedy Showcase we fervently hope receives a full commission.