Tim Teeman

Dolly Wells interview

As season two of the sitcom Doll & Em begins, Dolly Wells talks about her best friend on and off screen, Emily Mortimer, and her tangled relationship with her father, the satirist John Wells.

Flights of fancy were evident in the glossy BBC drama Material Girl, an hour that felt a bit like a day of blistering sunshine and horrendous hailstorm: funny then not funny; sharp, then suddenly, lamentably pedestrian. The story of a plucky young fashion designer and her evil former boss had all the Cinderella elements of Ugly Betty, the show it most obviously resembled. However, whereas the latter glorifies in its absurdity, its camp cartoonishness, Material Girl allowed Dervla Kirwan as Davina to dress up as Cruella de Vil, and snarl and scowl icily, but then the tone receded and became all workmanlike and clunky. British, in other words.

Lenora Crichlow as Ali, who had left the evil Davina to set up on her own, slugged beer from a bottle (to show she was a regular gal), she didn't want some fancy-schmancy star to wear her dress to the Baftas (yeah right!). Her boyfriend is just a regular guy courier who rides a motorbike and who puts her, chaste and untouched, to bed after she gets hideously drunk. What a prince.

Material Girl isn't as bad as some critics say, but it's not as fun as it could be. It's not really new to identify fashion as vapid and fashion people as empty, self-serving egotists. (Oh and for all the men to be bitchy, camp gays: there are not enough of them on TV, thanks!) There's a great moment in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep tells Anne Hathaway she can pretend to be all superior about this empty world, but what about the blue jumper she's wearing ... which Streep then deconstructs piercingly. Material Girl could be very funny, if it had a sharper, more knowing respect for the world it sets out to satirise.

Do we really have to speak about Big Top? OK. Big Top is a sitcom about a failing circus, inexplicably starring the wooden, joke-killing Amanda Holden as the scatty, though apparently strong-willed, owner. There's a trapeze artist madly in love with her, Ruth Madoc as a dog-handler, and other rather good actors (Sophie Thompson, John Thomson) flailing with a lame script. Patrick Baladi as a health and safety advisor was ejected at the end of episode one after failing to persuade Holden of the merits of a life of mortgage trackers and convention. Lucky him. Poor us.

Their sketch show was an obnoxious, homophobic mess, so it's probably wise that Mathew Horne and James Corden have returned in the show that first made them popular, Gavin & Stacey. The first episode of this final series was like a warm bath: slightly eccentric characters, love and empathy bubbling around the intertwined lives of three families. Gavin has moved to Wales to work and live with Stacey and was bored. His first day at work was littered with grating, if sweet, interventions - balloons, phone messages, a packed lunch from Rob Brydon's Uncle Bryn - which delighted his new, and yes kooky, colleagues.

You can see why Gavin & Stacey is universally loved: the dialogue is carefully colloquial, everyone has their turn, it affirms family and friendship, has a dark edge - but for this viewer there is a sense of old tricks being recycled. Everyone's quirks ("What's occurrin'?") are so well-worn they have lost their magic.

The only distinctive performances are Ruth Jones's monotone Nessa, with baby (who is with her though concealed at all times) and the marvellous, foul-mouthed Doris/Dor (Margaret John) who stuck two fingers up at the expectation that she'd make salad for the christening party. You should root for Corden's Smithy, father of Nessa's baby and trying to find a role for himself now his best friend has moved away and the mother of his child is with a new partner, but he's supremely irritating and unfunny.

They don't make eggheads like they used to. Alexander Armstrong wore his best cosmetic slaphead with distracting ginger furze in Micro Men, the story of Clive Sinclair's race with his former colleague Chris Curry (Martin Freeman) to develop the personal computer in Cambridge. There was a wilfully mischievous tone to Tony Saint's drama, which spanned the late-1970s to mid-1980s: Armstrong as Sinclair was an erratic mix of geeky idealist and corporate tyrant. One minute he would be discussing the finer points of circuitry, the next throwing a phone through a window.

Sinclair was determined to take personal computing to new frontiers: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp - or what's a heaven for?", he said, quoting Browning. But he was also shown to be a control freak, ironically, as the thing he most resented in the early days was the "Stalinist" stranglehold on his company of the National Enterprise Board. Curry jumped ship from Sinclair after Sinclair refused to let him work on computers, insisting he focus instead on Sinclair's masterplan to develop a "personalised motor vehicle".

The early personal computer was quintessentially British: amateurish, user-unfriendly and unbecoming, but also a stunning technical achievement rooted in boffinry. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, the idea of having a personal computer seemed astonishing. Saint's drama included old episodes of John Craven's Newsround and clunky TV computer shows to show how far our expectations, and technology, had progressed in such a short space of time. Sinclair began as the hare, with the ZX80, ZX81 and later the Spectrum capturing the public imagination - although he was initially annoyed that people were more keen to play games on computers than anything else.

Armstrong presented Sinclair as occasionally regretful that Curry had left him to set up Acorn Computers, but his ambition to do things for magically cheap figures - £99 for a personal computer - soon displaced wistfulness. But even the big bucks couldn't extinguish the spirit of invention and innovation, which pinged as brightly as the green neon of the early computer. The conflict in Micro Men wasn't just between Sinclair and Curry, it was between egg-headery and profit; both men had teams of impressively long-haired nerds.

Armstrong caught Sinclair's weird diffidence perfectly. Assailed by a bevy of beauties at a Mensa conference, he banged on about his ambition to put the words of every book ever written on to something the size of a sugar cube. One of the women said it was nice to put his hands on something big once in a while. He nodded, as if she were making another scientific point, and then actually got what she was suggesting and his smile widened for a millisecond.

Sinclair and Curry were ultimately thrown into competition to supply the BBC with a computer system - which, several hundred sleepless nights and many kebabs later, Acorn won. (At Sinclair HQ, another telephone was thrown.) Home computers were all over the shops, but almost as quickly Sinclair and Curry were over-reaching themselves; Sinclair by trying to drive himself upmarket (he raged that he did not want to be known as "the man who bought you Jet Set F***ing Willy"). Acorn tried to go downmarket. They were both out of step. The consumer had moved on to the first CD players.

Sinclair emerged the more moderately triumphant when he swung past Curry late one night on one of his absurd C5 vehicles: his formal attire, his ugly machine and his slap-headedness all combining to produce an immediate visual gag. An absurd fight broke out between the rival boffins in their former local with scrappy punches and feeble attempts to concuss with newspapers. Reconciled afterwards, Sinclair told Curry that he was looking into the possibility of the flying car. Both companies were sold on, but the eggheads were not sunk.

Lunch Monkeys had the grey pallor of Wardle's charred grayling, a dull sitcom in which Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps entered into an unhappy marriage with a sub-standard retread of The Office. It centred on the workers of an office postroom. There was a bitchy office manager, thick lads who are quite endearing, a blonde, female good-hearted object of lust, a slimy, mucky solicitor, all of whom said exactly the crass jokes you'd expect from them. Nigel Havers looked understandably depressed as the office head honcho. One for the shredder.

Somebody save Clive Anderson. He presided over the grim, toothless inanity of The Funny Side of TV Experts with a wilting desperation. This was the last chance saloon of clip shows; we had seen the clips before on every other clip show and all Anderson had to do was kill each familiar retread with a terrible line. We went from the cook Marguerite Patten to Trinny and Susannah with cursory cheap jokes and a cavalcade of TV experts talking about other TV experts. Still, fleeting glimpses of Patrick Moore, Magnus Pyke and the Baby Jane-ified features of Fanny Cradock averted a sudden slitting of the wrists.

Psychoville has a Marmite effect on viewers: the story of a group of grotesques bought together by menacing notes, it reached an ingenious conclusion last night. Mr Jolly the clown was revealed as the puppeteer, Eileen Atkins was the sadistic matron of the asylum where all the characters were once resident (and where the wannabe serial killer David first struck - Atkins's nurse his victim, after a vicious series of electric shocks). Each character, every line, was cannily, cleverly drawn, toilet humour dovetailing with jolting pathos - and there's nothing like an explosion for a cliffhanger.

Getting On gets better. Somehow Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine have created a comedy about a modern NHS ward that is piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious. This week, a foul-mouthed racist OAP went on the rampage, delivering a bloody nose to the new male matron, who desperately tried to remember his stay-calm management training module as his nose bled.

The humour in Getting On is stealthy: the harassed doctor searched for her stool samples, hustled pathetically for a car-parking space and saw not that many patients - then looked at her lined face in the toilet and wondered where the years had gone. This moving reverie was interrupted by the head nurse rapping on the door, insisting that it should never be locked. The doctor she fancied, played by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi (who also directs Getting On), looked past her at a much younger model. The comedy in Getting On is as wincing as The Thick of It, with the added pathos of near-death patients wheezing their last. Or not, as happened this week, with the sudden, vexing recovery of one.

In Psychoville, the goblins have been running riot for some time. Last night's stunning episode balanced dark drama with dark comedy, leavened with a perfectly pitched, yet subversive, homage to Hitchcock's Rope shot in two long takes. The serial killer obsessed serial killer David (Steve Pemberton) has been killing people, under the evil aegis of mother Maureen (Reece Shearsmith).

It says something about the skill of the men's writing and performance that you look past the grotesque drag of both characters instantly. You laugh at the ridiculous mix of homeliness and psychopathy and at the deliciously childish wordplay, then shudder at the truth of their relationship: incestuous, yes, but their bond - the shady death, finally revealed here, of David's father - was movingly evoked, as was their shared dependence on one another.

The script was devilishly fast and crafty. Mark Gatiss was brilliant as the camp and unknowing interloper bringing the secrets of the past to the surface. He seemed to be a policeman, but wasn't: he was an am-dram devotee after a role, and hopeful that his brazen theatricality would win David and Maureen into casting him in a murder-mystery event. The twist was that they were going to kill him, believing him to be a real policeman, but let him go when they discovered he was not. He was murdered ultimately, having discovered that Maureen had killed David's father, not David (as David had believed). David hadn't known that either.

Matt Lipsey's direction would surely have made The Master proud: in the claustrophobic confines of David and Maureen's scuzzy, blood-spattered flat the camerawork was as unrelenting and viciously playful as the script. The over-stylised, freaky vibe of Psychoville can sometimes appeal only to the dedicated, the horror and comedy too grave-robbingly close to its cousin The League of Gentlemen. However, this episode was supremely classy and stood alone as a fluent, delicious piece of television. Lucky you if you caught it.