Tony Gardner

Ruth Jones's comedy-drama opens for its fifth series of slightly ridiculous storylines and panto-esque characters. Stella is being ridiculously tolerant of the fact that her current love interest, Michael, is fathering the lovechild of Beyoncé, whom Aunty Brenda refers to as the local Jezebel. Nadine is preparing to christen her daughter, while her dopey husband, Karl, is stuck on a train. Meanwhile, there's a new undertaker in Pontyberry as Ivan Schloss (Fresh Meat's Tony Gardner) comes to town. It's pleasant comfort telly.

Radio Times review

Star/co-creator Ruth Jones calls another Welsh favour this week. After cameos in previous series from Lord Kinnock, presenter Gethin Jones and rugby star Scott Quinnell, Andy Fairweather Low gets to busk in a pub! The Wide Eyed and Legless singer is the kind of delightful aside at which this post-watershed Pobol y Cwm excels.

The crux of the episode is expectant vamp Beyoncé applying a financial squeeze on the rueful Michael, while comedy linchpins Bobby and Brenda tussle for the same ndertaker's job. Their interviewer is the enigmatic Ivan Schloss (the usually excellent Tony Gardner, here with an uncomfortable accent). If it's all a tad overplayed, the feel-good factor conquers all.

Ullman's enduring status is evident in her comeback show, with Samantha Spiro, Tony Gardner and Rupert Grint turning out as foils. The credits confirm the former 80s star of Three of a Kind also has the best writing and production team available. But this is not so much hit-and-miss as not-aiming-at-anything-concrete in the first place. Recurring characters, mimicry and light satire all refuse to ignite in a show that doesn't look as if its creator desperately needed to create it.

One return I am excited about is that of Last Tango in Halifax which was announced on Twitter just after this Sunday's magnificent series three finale. Sally Wainwright's brilliant ear for dialogue was on full display as Gillian (Nicola Walker) voiced her doubts about marrying boorish childhood sweetheart Robbie (Dean Andrews). The structure of the piece saw Wainwright apply a non-linear narrative as Gillian flashed back to tell Caroline (Sarah Lancashire) about her dalliances with a younger co-worker as well as Caroline's ex-husband John (Tony Gardner). The realistic sequences were punctuated with some high comedy as Caroline struggled to change a tyre whilst wearing her Sunday best whilst Robbie looked on the verge of vomiting after overdoing it on his stag night the prior evening. Wainwright kept the audience guessing whether Gillian would marry Robbie while she also focused on the frosty relationship between Alan (Derek Jacobi) and his love child Gary (Rupert Graves). As the camera swept round the multitude of happy couples at Robbie and Gillian's wedding it reminded me just how much Wainwright had made me care about her characters. I'd wept with Caroline after she'd lost her partner and felt for Gillian as she drudged up the abuse that her late husband inflicted on her. Wainwright has been lucky to find an excellent ensemble cast who deal with her well-paced dialogue beautifully. Special mention has to go to Walker who is utterly believable, playing the likeable Gillian who is prone to making some terrible mistakes. The only criticism I have is the continued presence of Gardner's John who at this point I feel is surplus to requirements and I hope he doesn't return for series four. Apart from that though I would say that this is Last Tango's best series to date and I'm already ridiculously excited about what series four will bring.

The controversial war-zone comedy returns for a second tour of duty as we catch up with bomb disposal unit Bluestone 42 in Helmand Province, where the humour is as dark and blue as ever. Tony Gardner (Fresh Meat) is back at the top of the food chain as Lt Col Philip Smith, coolly exerting his leadership over hot-blooded troops who bicker and battle as a distraction from the ever-present threat of attack. While Captain Nick Medhurst (Oliver Chris) weighs up his handgun against that of new arrival Cpl Gordon House (Matthew Lewis), Padre Mary Greenstock (Kelly Adams) announces a special award - to the 'filthiest bastard on the base'.

Radio Times review

The brash comedy about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan returns with more gags about IEDs, STDs and the Taliban. Matthew Lewis - Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter films - throws off that sweet-natured image as he joins the cast as a new second-in-command to conceited Captain Medhurst (Oliver Chris).

As ever the base is riven by one-upmanship and ego clashes, particularly in Chris and Lewis's game of my gun's better than your gun. That could make for great comedy but the banter gets in the way. The best thing is Tony Gardner as the nonchalant Lieutenant Colonel - his lesson in the art of war is a minor masterpiece.

The shockwaves from Gillian's escaped secret are still evident tonight, as Celia tries to reassure Alan that he did the right thing in keeping shtum. Elsewhere, Kate and Caroline's romance hits some turbulence as a mini-break turns sour upon the arrival of a new character. Then Alan hears some news that puts him in mind of family unification. Meanwhile, hapless John (a consistently brilliant performance by Tony Gardner) makes another one of his impulsive decisions about love. Splendid.

It's been a thinnish week for drama but Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright's almost sugar-free romance about two pensioners - former lovestruck teenagers reunited by Facebook after 60 years - was back for a second series having won the nation's affection and a Bafta last time out.

We found the pair almost as we left them, with the excellent Derek Jacobi as Alan, recovering from a heart attack brought on by their hasty quarrel about the desirability of lesbianism in Harrogate and perhaps one too many respiratory struggles with glottal northernisms (the downfall of many a thespian). Much has been made of this septuagenarian double act, and Jacobi and Anne Reid, a natural as Celia, shone even when they were just gazing over t'moors and talking about dead people.

It would be a gentler story, though, without the complications whipped up by their clashing daughters - Gillian (Nicola Walker), a widowed single mum and grubby farmer with an impulsive sex drive, and freshly outed Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), snooty head teacher of a school that sings Jerusalem every morning - each conscious, amid declarations of love and alarm bells at the realisation that old people have minds of their own, of festering parental disapproval that recent events could only aggravate.

With Caroline's dalliance with a junior female colleague out in the open, it was Gillian's turn to stir the pot with revelations of a drunken shag with Caroline's multi-philandering husband John (a wonderfully furtive Tony Gardner). I couldn't say whether this was more transgressive than Gillian's earlier eye-opener - seeing her carrying on (Yorkshire for sexual intercourse) with a lad young enough to be her son from the local filling station - but it had Derek Jacobi shaking his head. "You pillock," he said, a word that wasn't quite equal to his disappointment (he was thinking of the shame she had brought upon the house as a pregnant 15-year-old), but served to draw a line under the affair before he had another heart attack. In the end we left the lovebirds understandably sloping off to the register office for a deserved quiet wedding. But will they get it? Tune in Tuesday.

Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid resume their touching romance as mature lovebirds Alan and Celia for a second season of laughter and tears. Having narrowly cheated death last time out, Alan has a renewed zest for life and, apart from a spot of rock climbing, what he really, really, wants to do is be married to Celia - and the sooner the better. As for daughters Gillian and Caroline, the near-fatal crisis appears to have brought the families closer together. But the honeymoon period hits turbulence when Caroline's wastrel ex John enters the scene and complex emotions bubble to the surface. Nicola Walker, Sarah Lancashire and Tony Gardner co-star.

At the end of the first series of Sally Wainwright's winning, warm-hearted drama, dear Alan was hovering between life and death after a heart attack. Obviously he survives, or there wouldn't be much point in returning to Yorkshire for a second helping.

It's great to see everyone again in a drama where pensioners are loved, cherished and never dismissed as inconvenient, and this time the masterly Wainwright has broadened the drama to dig deeper into other characters, notably Caroline (Sarah Lancashire, who's excellent) the newly-confident and newly out lesbian. While Alan and Celia (Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid) mend the relationship that almost fractured for ever, there's a shift in the tectonic plates in the romantic lives of their families. Just look at poor Gillian (Nicola Walker), who is made to pay for her terrible mistake in sleeping with John (Tony Gardner), Caroline's pathologically hopeless estranged husband. No one does bleating wretchedness like Gardner - no one.