Tony Gardner

Celia and Alan (Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi) are having a ball as the late-blooming romance drama beds in. They're racing through the gears of the relationship that escaped them 60 years earlier and, while their daughters are less than impressed, nothing touches Celia's wastrel son-in-law, John. Played by Tony Gardner, he is as gloriously dissolute here as he is creepy as Fresh Meat's Professor Shales.

I know Fresh Meat didn't start out as a rom-com and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong still might be horrified to find their creation described as such. But that is undoubtedly what it has become, albeit in a very street-smart, sharp and funny way. It's amazing how many rom-coms forget to add the com part.

But if it was the humour that initially caught people's attention, it has long since become just one element in a show of increasing depth. Much as I admired the performances of Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid et al in Last Tango, I wasn't greatly involved with their characters and I wasn't at all put out when their hour was up. With Fresh Meat, I am. I feel a sense of loss when the closing credits roll. I've come to care about these people. I love the way they move from the deadly serious to the totally absurd mid-sentence, in the way only university students can. I love the awkwardness of their relationships. Or rather, entanglements.

As JP - his Stowe chums call him JPaedo, but be careful what you tweet - Jack Whitehall is in danger of making posh boys sympathetic and Josie's attempts to make the housemates believe she hasn't been kicked off the course were becoming more and more poignant. Only Vod could imagine Josie must have acquired a smack habit. Don't ever change, Vod. Nor you, Kingsley and Oregon. And as for Howard ...? How could Sabine have gone back to Holland?

Even the minor characters - the geology lecturer excepted - are well drawn. Professor Shales (Tony Gardner), Oregon's ex - she has now got off with his son - is a case in point. As John, the slightly seedy man having a midlife crisis in Last Tango, Gardner was fairly one-dimensional: as Shales, the slightly seedy man having a midlife crisis, his desperate sadness is almost touching. Almost. When rom-coms are this good, what's not to love?

There hasn't been a good series about "second time around lovers" since Nineties sitcom As Time Goes By. This charming comedy-drama ends that drought in style. Celia Dawson (Anne Reid) and Alan Buttershaw (Derek Jacobi) are both widowed and haven't seen each other for 60 years. When the old flames are reunited via Facebook, their feelings are reignited - and they discover that it was a twist of fate that separated them in the first place.

This is superior fare, based on writer Sally Wainwright's (Scott & Bailey) own mother's internet romance. It's also directed by Doctor Who alumnus Euros Lyn and made by estimable production company Red. However, it's the performances that truly elevate it - not just from classy leads Reid and Jacobi who are amusingly irascible and sweetly bumbling, respectively, but a strong supporting cast which includes Sarah Lancashire, Nicola Walker, Tony Gardner and Ronni Ancona. All come into their own over the six episodes, as the lovers' families are thrown together amid sub-plots involving bisexuality, alchoholism and a murder mystery. Watch out for a neat surprise in the final scene of this opener.

Though its fourth season has been its least impressive, Armando Iannucci's political satire will none the less go down as one of the best ever British comedies: sharp and cynical. Tonight, after last Saturday's excellent Leveson and Chilcot-inspired special, it finally bows out, with an instalment overflowing with delicious duplicity and inventive insults - not least from Malcom Tucker (the ever-wonderful Peter Capaldi) who gives Ollie Reader (Chris Addison) a hilarious dressing down.

The episode picks up with the Home Office having cut police numbers, which in turn has created a huge backlog of arrest paperwork. Cleverly, however, they've managed to shift the blame onto the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship for the burgeoning queues at police stations. "I doubt there are any major criminals on the loose," says Phil Smith (Will Smith). "This is about paperwork; it's not Con Air." Elsewhere, Dan Miller (Tony Gardner), at Malcolm's suggestion, is sent on a fact-finding mission to a police station in an attempt to make the Government look unresponsive. To say any more about the plot would give too much away, but viewers can expect a climax that is as poignant as it is amusing.

We arrive at the Gates, Sky Living's new sitcom about the parents and staff of a congenial city primary, and the 15-minute social minefield they're forced to navigate at the beginning and end of each school day. Gates had the potential to be a new Outnumbered, with its harried middle-class parents, and its ensemble's impeccable comedy pedigree: Sue Johnston (The Royle Family); Joanna Page (Gavin & Stacey); Tony Gardner (Lead Balloon; Fresh Meat).

In the first episode, builder and new parent Mark (Tom Ellis, him off Miranda) was cornered on the school run by two terrifying mums: a militantly mustard-keen Aussie who organises coffee mornings and salsa-cise evenings, and an uncomfortably tactile art therapist. The teacher (Johnston) is perpetually hung- over. The headmaster is barely out of short trousers himself, and eager to please Ofsted with his "School and Home Partnership Workshop Week" (aka Parents' Week). The only sane people in the school are the pupils.

I laughed out loud once - at the headmaster's bowing and scraping before a bemused Ofsted inspector - and smiled once or twice more. Gates hasn't quite decided whether it's a realist cringe comedy, or a semi-surrealist one. A lot of sitcom pilots disappoint, but they can improve with age. The second series of both the BBC's Episodes and Grandma's House, for example, have been received far more warmly than their first. Gates is still only half an idea, middlingly executed, but given time it might settle into something more watchable. Outnumbered, though, it ain't.

Gavin & Stacey's Joanna Page, Sue Johnston and Tom Ellis (better known as Miranda's love interest) star in a new comedy about the parents who meet daily to pick their kids up from school. Helen (Page) and Mark (Ellis) enrol their daughter in her new primary school, where they encounter the minefield of parental etiquette, volunteering for the PTA and school-gate flirtations. Support from Catherine Shepherd, Ella Kenion and Tony Gardner. Promises good things.

Rejoice and be glad because Fresh Meat is right back on song for its final episode, full of the well-worked plotlines and gorgeous character comedy that make it so lovable. The fling between Profesor Shales and Oregon has kicked up a gear now that his wife has thrown him out, so the two are moving in together. The great Tony Gardner as Shales is always brilliant but he gets bigger laughs than ever when he briefly moves into the student house and has to pour tiny plastic pots of creamer on his home-made muesli. One shot of him in his wonderfully daft dressing-gown speaks volumes.

There follows an awkward dinner party between his poncey friends and the housemates ("So, what else are young people into...?") and of course some great work from Jack Whitehall as JP: his reaction when he realises that he has double-booked on the day of his dad's funeral is priceless. Roll on the second series.

The casting in Fresh Meat is ­brilliant. Where has Zawe Ashton who plays Vod been hiding all these years? The same goes for Charlotte Ritchie, who plays Oregon.

I just hope these freshers fail their exams so they have to stay at uni until they're about 35 and we can keep watching.

This week, Oregon's affair with her sleazy English tutor (Lead Balloon's Tony Gardner) utterly fails to live up to her romantic ­expectations, Josie decides to split up with her boyfriend, doing Kingsley a massive favour, while JP and Howard attempt to score some drugs.

And what's Vod up to? Well, she's actually reading a book.

It takes a special kind of talent to make just reading a book funny or to deliver a line like "I've never tried risotto - who cares?" so that it becomes comedy gold.

And that's not the kind of ability they can teach in the new drama course that Kingsley has just signed up for. Although it offers other benefits.

The idea of having different writers pen each episode of a sitcom is a good one. It's what they do in American television. And with old hands such as Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong in charge, Fresh Meat has kept up a high standard. Until now.

Tonight's episode of the student house-share comedy isn't bad, it's not bad at all. But by the standards of the series so far, it's a little... blunt. Instead of amusingly suppressed sexual tension between the student housemates, we have sex and (mostly) talk of sex, as well as drugs and talk of drugs.

The storyline that works best is between Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie)and her creepy tutor/lover Professor Shales (brilliantly played by Tony Gardner), who awkwardly criss-cross the murky waters between work and pleasure. Meanwhile, Kingsley makes a revelation about his (so far) sheltered life.

Fresh Meat, now that it's moved on to writers other than Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, occasionally lapses into Yoof callow, a form of comic writing that privileges the brutally scatological over anything more nuanced. There was a nasty exchange in last night's episode, which stuck out like a... well, let's say a besmirched appendage. But there's also much better stuff, whether it was the silly comedy of Howard talking through his all-you-can-eat buffet tactics (which include a concealed bin-liner) or a lovely line from Tony Gardner's Professor Shales, who at first looked like a cocky sexual predator but has now revealed himself to be overshadowed by his more successful wife: "Jean thinks I'm Plath," he whined to Oregon as he attempted to seduce her. "But I'm not Plath, I'm Hughes." Cut the self-conscious filth from some comedies and there wouldn't be a lot left. Cut it from Fresh Meat and you'd be left with the best stuff.