Tom Hollander

Without Tom Hollander in the lead, there wouldn't be much substance to this gentle sitcom. But with him, playing ineffectual vicar Adam Smallbone, it's well worth a look. Smallbone is like a timid, furry creature let loose among bigger, tougher carnivores. This week, his bullying archdeacon turns up for a service when Adam's congregation is at its smallest, and warns Adam that he's "letting the side down". Whereupon a trendy minister turns up with a big PA system and a smoothie bar, and fills the church with excited worshippers. For better or worse?

If Rev reflects the true spiritual devotion of east London, then the area is clearly going to hell. This episode starts with our hapless vicar (Tom Hollander) preaching to an 'upsettingly small turnout' of five people and there isn't even a Tube strike on. But that's not his only woe - he wants things to improve in the bedroom as well, which is the cue for lots of gentle innuendo of the 'that's a very nice organ' variety.

Hallelujah, and praise The Lord, for a decent sitcom. I would even go so far as saying that should Rev find the audience it deserves - which is never a given - it would have the makings of a classic.

Not since Channel 4's brilliant, if shamefully underrated, Book Group has an opening episode so impressed me. James Wood's script was an object lesson in how to set up a series with the minimum of plot contrivance, clunky exposition or stereotypical characters. Moreover, it positively exuded confidence, intelligence and wit: never surrendering to the temptation of the cheap gag, but allowing its humour to build gradually and seductively. The laughs, when they came, were worth waiting for.

The excellent Tom Hollander takes the title role of the Reverend Adam Smallbone - OK, maybe the one cheap gag - newly arrived from the delights of rural Suffolk to minister to a socially and economically deprived inner-city parish. Dibley it ain't.

Episode one saw his minute congregation suddenly swollen by middle-class parents attracted by the whiff of a good Ofsted report for the local church school. With a hole in the stained glass window to repair, Smallbone's conscience is sorely tested by this new and potentially lucrative source of income.

Rev is by turns gentle and charming, acerbic and satiric. Its allotted span of one score and ten minutes flew by far too quickly, and I can't remember the last time I thought that about a new sitcom.

If I have one minor criticism, it is Smallbone's internal monologue with God. At first this struck me as just a little bit twee, but then I figured that an element of spirituality is tolerable in a comedy about a vicar, so as long as God doesn't answer back, I'm prepared to forgive it. Amen.

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

As the lovably hapless Tom Hollander shone his way though the comedic murk of Rev, it was hard to escape the feeling that this gentle sitcom was merely The Vicar of Dibley in reverse. Where that show had Dawn French playing an inner-city cleric transposed to a country setting, this new series saw a rural reverend trying to make the best of his east London posting.

Aimed, perhaps, at those who loved Dibley but found Father Ted too sweary, Hollander had the good grace to remove his dog collar before uttering the "F" word and the show, for all its try-hard 21st-century references and excellent supporting cast, came across as old-fashioned as Derek Nimmo's All Gas and Gaiters. A programme, it must be noted, that hit screens in the same year that John Lennon declared the Beatles "more popular than Jesus".

Last night's TV: Rev

Rev looks quite promising, in a gentle kind of way. Tom Hollander's is an attractive character - beset by troubles and doubts, weak, but a good guy at heart.

TV ratings: BBC2 sitcom Rev draws 2m

Rev, starring Tom Hollander as a vicar in east London, secures 10.7% audience share to beat Big Brother.

Tom Hollander in Rev - review

Despite having a fantastic cast, a likeable lead and a premise that has comedic potential, Rev has few laughs yet somehow isn't a crashing disappointment.

In a medium awash with lazy stereotypes, it's original thinking that stands out. The most compelling television provides a new perspective on an old story, and challenges the laziest of preconceptions with wit, humour and more than a dash of bravado.

BBC Two's new series Rev is pretty much a masterclass in how to pull this off. Take one fine actor (Tom Hollander), add an equally brilliant supporting cast (Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney, Ellen Thomas), choose a fraught subject (religion), throw in some punchy writing (James Wood) and get Peter Cattaneo (of The Full Monty fame) to direct the lot and what have you got? A damn fine reason to stay up late on Monday nights, that's what.

Firstly, the subject matter: religion, or more specifically, the Church of England. With the notable exception of Father Ted, comedies involving vicars tend to be soporifically safe. Not only is Rev travelling without seatbelts, it is also doing 90 miles an hour down country lanes with the roof off and the stereo on full blast. This is no gentle cake-and-cassock comedy; it's the story of an ordinary, fallible vicar living in a tough, brutal world who is trying to do something very extraordinary: stay true to his faith.

That the Reverend Adam Smallbone is an ordinary fellow we know from his behaviour. He is a man who jumps the lights on his bike, who gets nervous and drinks too much at parties, who tries (and fails) to have sex with his wife. His flawed but irresistibly likeable persona comes across loud and clear in just a few opening moments, brilliantly pinpointed by the direction, the writing and, of course, by Hollander himself, whose performance is outstanding.

The themes, too, are unrelentingly contemporary. Smallbone is in charge of St Saviours, a grand, dilapidated church in a run-down inner-city area of London with a confusingly mixed catchment. There are the regulars, a rag-tag collection of locals led by Colin, the neighbourhood ne'er do well, who has a fond affection for the "vicarage"; and there are the newcomers, in the shape of the arrogant, urbane middle classes, led by the local MP, played as a modern-day social Flashman by Alexander Armstrong. Simon McBurney is deliciously oily as the Archbishop, who Smallbone only ever seems to encounter in the back of a taxi, all black leather gloves and dark threats.

The opening theme is current and controversial: "On your knees, avoid the fees", chirps Armstrong's villainous MP, as he horse-trades a place for his delinquent son in exchange for cash to repair the broken stained glass window of St Saviours. It's a merciless commentary on modern life; but it also has a surprisingly strong moral, dare I say thoughtfully theological, core. The temptations that assail Smallbone may be very contemporary in their nature; but they are as eternal as the themes of the Bible itself: right v wrong, truth v corruption, the poor v the rich.

As to the comedy, it's of the organic kind, not the obvious gag kind. Outside the church, the Reverend and Colin share a bottle of beer and discuss Richard Dawkins (as you do). "If I met him I'd kick him in the bollocks," says Colin, with customary frankness. Earlier Smallbone, confronted for the nth time by a group of sneering builders and their spectacularly unfunny jokes about choir boys, pauses. Slowly, and with a look of weary resignation, he removes his dog-collar. "Why don't you just f*** off," he says. The viewer punches the air with joy.

Tom Hollander's inner-city cleric is no angel

There are no real laugh-out-loud moments, and some of the gags are a little predictable. But it's a surprisingly fresh and genuinely funny mainstream comedy, and could grow into something memorable.