Vicki Pepperdine

Joanna Scanlan & Vicki Pepperdine on women in comedy

As they join the cast of BBC sitcom Rev. for its third series, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine talk churches, their previous hit Getting On, and women's place in comedy.

Baby Smallbone makes a grand entrance to open the third series of this lugubriously endearing sitcom, joining her dad - the world-weary but eternally optimistic Rev Adam (Tom Hollander) - and her slightly less idealistic mum Alex (Olivia Colman).

The divine cherry on top of the comedy cake is the perfect pairing of Getting On's Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine as cost-cutting church types who sit somewhere below God but well above our Rev on the heavenly ladder.

This puts them in a position to 'reorganise' his church out of existence unless he can come up with some PC box-ticking inspiration pretty darn quick.

Video: British Comedy Awards interviews

Sara Shulman interviews Johnny Vegas, Steve Coogan, Jack Whitehall, Vicki Pepperdine, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Rosenthal and Ryan Sampson at The British Comedy Awards.

Writers' Guild Awards 2013 shortlists

Nominations for Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine, Joanna Scanlan, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Stefan Golaszewski, Susan Calman, Sanjeev Kohli, Donald McLeary, David Sedaris, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram.

Despite the impeccable credentials of everyone involved (Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine), Up The Women just doesn't fly. For a start, there's no real point; any political edge is sidestepped or dampened by the air of farce. And the humour itself is limited to double entendre, sight gags and broad physical comedy. Why couldn't the BBC have just commissioned a full series of Hynes and Julia Davis's scabrous Lizzie and Sarah instead?

How many Edwardians does it take to change a light bulb? About eight if Up the Women is anything to go by, though as one of them said: "It's hard to see how this would replace the candle."

Jessica Hynes wrote in this newspaper last week that her three-part sitcom about a group of failed suffragettes was originally intended as a film. It says nothing too complimentary about our priorities that the project ended up as a BBC4 micro-budget three-parter, shot in front of a studio audience in a two-room set.

As it was, the traces of its film script origins were detectable in Hynes's performance as the clever but timid Margaret. She proposed that the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle revitalise itself as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage. Hynes appeared to be acting in the uplifting, thoughtful movie that you would never have quite got round to seeing at your local arthouse cinema. Oddly, though, she seemed to be surrounded by performances, from Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine et al, that were sketch-show broad.

The script, too, careered between these two registers. Still, the brilliant Pepperdine had some funny false teeth and mugged her way through a quite silly knob gag. That just about got my floating vote.

Up the Women has a great premise: a ladies' craft circle is politicised by Margaret (Jessica Hynes) into forming a group to "politely request women's suffrage". It also has a great cast, including Rebecca Front as a dissenting snob ("Does your husband know you were cavorting with skirted anarchists?") and Vicki Pepperdine as a simple-minded "old maid". All it lacked was a great first episode. There were some overdone historical gags (one about a lightbulb being a "ridiculous fad" seemed to last for several years), with suffragettes described as "mannish, flat-fronted, bottom-heavy spinsters".

Up the Women seemed undecided whether to aim for a suffrage-themed Dad's Army vibe, or Blackadder-style absurdist drollery, falling nervously in between. Saying that, first episodes are notoriously tricky, and there was more than enough to merit another peek. My favourite bit was Margaret's earnest, quavering, suffragette singsong that attempted to be rousing but ending up sounding as if somebody from Songs of Praise was being gently lowered into a well.

So where would Jessica Hynes go after her brilliant turn as the spectacularly ghastly PR Siobhan in Twenty Twelve?

The answer, rather surprisingly, is back in time, donning the high collars and sturdy skirts of suburban wife Margaret - a pillar of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle - in Up The Women (BBC4).

Except that Margaret has seen the light, a brush with suffragettes in London has opened her eyes to the Votes For Women cause. Now Margaret is determined to spread the word to her fellow stitching ladies.

However, in her way stands the indomitable Helen, a woman who likes the world just the way it is - because she's in charge - and who squashes the intellectually frustrated Margaret flat, telling her: 'I know it's hard for you to accept that you've read all those books for nothing.'

This could all come across as a quaint timepiece but Hynes, who writes as well as stars, cleverly draws parallels between life now and life a century ago, without hammering the point home.

Women still have a hard time being valued on intellect alone, just as they did in Edwardian times. Margaret is a woman for all ages.

Buoyed by some fine performances - Hynes and Rebecca Front locked in psychological battle as Margaret and Helen, Vicki Pepperdine brilliant (as ever) as a cake-baking frump, Judy Parfitt squeezing every last drop of libido out of a lusty granny - Up The Women is a comedy that sneaks up on you, ambushing with sly wit rather than attacking with laugh-out-loud gags.

It's not the finished article and this is just a tester three-part run.

But I'd vote for any comedy that has Margaret explaining why she hasn't told her husband about her new-found militancy thus: 'He's been very melancholic since Nietzsche's death - I thought it might tip him over the edge.' Beyond good and evil, rock on.

Rebecca Front stars in Up the Women, written by Jessica Hynes, who co-penned the rather brilliant Spaced (1999-2001) but who, strangely, has never received the same acclaim as her co-writer Simon Pegg.

Up the Women is traditional in its format - it's set mostly in one room, in this instance a village hall where the Bunbury Intricate Crafts Circle meet. It's 1910, and one of BICC's members, Margaret (Hynes) has been seduced by Suffragettism while on a day trip to London. The group's self-appointed bossy-boots leader Helen (Front), meanwhile, is having none of it when Margaret meekly suggests the group might support women's emancipation - "Women should not have the vote. We are simple, emotional creatures."

Margaret is a brainy woman who has long since accepted that women must always defer to men, even those markedly less intelligent, and a good running gag involved her explaining electricity to the overbearing caretaker (Adrian Scarborough), who was struggling to fit a new-fangled lightbulb.

The characters - particularly Vicki Pepperdine's toothy spinster - are drawn in broad strokes, and occasionally the humour (peonies being misheard for penis, for instance) is groaningly obvious. But there are some neat lines too, and superb acting from a fantastic cast who look like they're enjoying themselves, including Judy Parfitt doing a nice turn as Helen's decidedly naughty mother, Myrtle, sexually liberated long before the term was invented by the Pankhursts' spiritual daughters. Worth staying with.