Vicki Pepperdine

Jessica Hynes leads from the front as Margaret in this jolly suffragette sitcom. A woman whose scientific mind and political aspirations are racing ahead of her fellow stitchers in the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle, Margaret is eager to embrace the modern world of 1910. A recent convert to the suffragette cause, can Margaret convince her circle to square up and join the fight for women's votes? Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and Ryan Sampson lend varying degrees of support.

Jessica Hynes moves as far as she can from her buzzword-spewing PR wonk in Twenty Twelve with a self-penned sitcom set in a church hall in Banbury in 1910. Hynes is Margaret, a mouse about to roar: she wants the other women in the local craft circle to put down their tapestries and agitate for women's suffrage.

It's a static, traditional affair. In episode one at least, we never leave the hall and its adjoining kitchen, and despite an army of additional gag-writers on the credits, you're more likely to smile creakily than laugh. But, gently, the foundations of something good are in place.

Rebecca Front and Vicki Pepperdine are terrific as a frosty antagonist and buck-toothed naïf respectively, Hynes is great as ever, and the central point - that the silly sexism of the time is still with us - lends it some edge.

Jessica Hynes's first full-series sitcom since Spaced could hardly be more different: old-fashioned, a little stagey and reminiscent of Dad's Army with its band of carefully characterised misfits playing a bit part in serious events of global significance.

Hynes is Margaret, leading a superb cast including Rebecca Front (whose embittered luddite conservative is a highlight), Vicki Pepperdine and Judy Parfitt as the ladies of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. The hot debate of the day (that day being in 1910) rapidly moves from tiffin provisions to whether or not to take up the suffragette cause after Margaret returns from London bursting with politely revolutionary zeal.

The performances are game (especially from Pepperdine, shelving any vanity rather magnificently), but the satire nibbles rather than bites; it's resolutely warm, gentle stuff, lacking a little polish and a big comic set-piece. Even so, it's a concept rich with potential and Hynes has more than earned our indulgence with her performance in Twenty Twelve.

From Monty Python and The Holy Grail to Blackadder, it's long been established that one of the underlying rules of historical comedy is to subvert the period setting with knowingly incongruous nods to the present day. Which is all well and good when employed as part of a wider comic arsenal, but cheap and wearying when overdone.

Unfortunately, that's the fatal undoing of Jessica Hynes' Edwardian-era sitcom Up The Women, which drills away at the supposedly hilarious spectacle of characters from the past failing to comprehend things we now take for granted.

Thus we have Adrian Scarborough's hapless caretaker getting into a pickle over the installation of a light bulb, and Rebecca Front's bullying snob sniffily dismissing electricity as a fad that'll never catch on. These moments, I should point out, are clearly regarded by Hynes and her five co-writers as rib-tickling conceits of massive comic import. Given that Hynes is a fine actress and co-writer of fondly regarded sitcom Spaced, the unrelenting weakness of her latest effort is hugely disappointing. It's not unreasonable to expect more from one of Britain's foremost comedy performers.

The only truly notable aspect of Up The Women is that it's a traditional studio-bound sitcom accompanied by a live laughter track, an ancient form new to "high-brow" BBC 4. But that presents its own problems; you can clearly hear the underwhelmed audience almost willing themselves to laugh as gag after gag falls flat.

Lines such as "I've had to swaddle mother again, and she really does put up quite a fight" and "Does your husband know you're cavorting with skirted anarchists?" have the rhythmic cadence of funny dialogue, but they're not actually witty in themselves. A sense of embarrassingly forced whimsy hangs over its attempts to revel in florid language à la Blackadder. But Hynes and co aren't in the same league as Curtis and Elton at their peak.

The characters speak in a combination of BBC Edwardiana and anachronistic contemporary argot, which, if one were feeling charitable, could be regarded as a parody of Andrew Davies' penchant for dropping contemporary terms into his period dramas. But the paucity of wit on display means it's all for naught.

Hynes plays a timid yet worldly-wise idealist whose belief in the suffragette movement throws her into sharp conflict with Front's stubbornly immovable conservative. And that's about it. All concerned - including an almost unrecognisable Vicki Pepperdine from Getting On as a daffy, buck-toothed housekeeper - deliver game performances, but no amount of gusto can compensate for such poor material. Having wasted such a fine cast, Up The Women merely wanders along to unremarkable effect.

Even taking into account the inherent difficulties of introducing a brand new sitcom over the course of 30 minutes, this lifeless groaner has to be regarded as a failure.

Show of the year - Getting On. The third run of writer-star trio Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's BBC4 series set in an NHS hospital was quite simply the best piece of British small-screen fiction in years. Branching out even further from its notional sitcom roots, it administered shots of high farce, occupational satire, metaphysical meditation and excruciating realism. I refuse to accept that Pepperdine's Dr Pippa Moore is not, at this moment, wafting through some overstretched ward, offering supercilious side smiles to confused geriatrics.

The definition of a slow-burn hit, this diffident black comedy picked up another armful of admirers with its third series - at this rate it'll sweep the 2017 Baftas. Life on the geriatric NHS ward staffed by nurses Den (Joanna Scanlan) and Kim (Jo Brand) and plagued by sniffy consultant Pippa (Vicki Pepperdine) was much the same. It was slightly worsened by increased outsourcing and management-speak but was still a case of making do, looking for small victories and, in the moments that give the series its tender heart, remembering that easing patients' pain is the point. Scanlan, Brand and Pepperdine's acting and writing was more assured then ever, with nicely woven story arcs never taking away the best thing about the series: it lets its realistic, ragged characters breathe.

Quietly brilliant and deserving of a lot more noise, Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's hospital comedy has explored the intersection between what's funny and what's heartbreaking without any self-regard or fuss.

Sky's been on a bit of a role in terms of comedy commissions. While most of the notable ones have been on Sky1 and Sky Atlantic, other channels have been making their own shows, with this one coming from Sky Arts 1.

A Young Doctor's Notebook is based on a collection of short stories made by the Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, most famous for his book The Master and Margarita. The story's told via extracts from an old doctor in 1930s Moscow (played by Mad Men star Jon Hamm), about his experiences working in tiny village hospital in the middle of nowhere just after his graduation in 1917 (his younger self being played by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame).

The opening story see the young doctor arrive at his new practice and dealing with his much more experience staff: Anna (Vicki Pepperdine), a midwife who is obsessed with the doctor's late predecessor Leopold Leopoldovich; fellow midwife Pelageya (Rosie Cavaliero) and the boring feldsher (Adam Godley). As the story goes on, the young doctor finds himself mysteriously in conflict with his older self, who keeps telling him what to do.

This opening episode was highly enjoyable. I've read some of Bulgakov's work before (i.e. Heart of a Dog) so I know a bit about his life and the book's in some ways based on his own experiences as a doctor in the Russian countryside. It does make you wonder exactly how much of it's based on stuff which occurred to him as there's quite a lot of gore. One of the most horrific yet funny scenes involves the young doctor trying to extract a tooth from a patient, which first leads him to drag the patient around the floor, before doing something I don't think it would be wise to mention now.

It's not just the slapstick which is good, but the characters too, especially the staff the doctor has to work with. The feldsher for example makes a study of how many things you can possibly fit into the young doctor's luggage (he counts socks individually).

Many people will be watching A Young Doctor's Notebook just to see the high-profile leads, but there's much more to this programme than just the cast.

Last night's viewing - A Young Doctor's Notebook

The stories have been made more comic and less grimly stark than the originals, Radcliffe playing the young doctor as an innocent out of his depth and keen to conceal the fact from the knowing nurses and medical orderly he notionally outranks. And, setting aside uncertainties, it's been very nicely done, with Vicki Pepperdine as an older nurse who fiercely protects the memory of the predecessor in the post, Leopold Leopoldovich, and Adam Godley as the hospital orderly, a man with a personality more numbing than chloroform.

Radio Times review

A obvious triumph for BBC4's understated cleverness, increasingly celebrated as the superb third series developed, was Getting On, which ended its run on Wednesday. Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine write and act this comedy, set in a women-only geriatric hospital ward. It's a masterclass in letting your creations breathe.

The main characters are all female, something that hardly ever happens on television but is never emphasised. This series acknowledged the accelerating privatisation of the health service, but wove it into Pepperdine's ace portrayal of the antagonist Dr Moore, a brittle snob who uses her sharp elbows to nurse her own reputation and sees patients as stock to be processed - or, in series three, potential subjects for her photographic study of vaginal atrophy in the elderly.

Dr Moore's desire for profitable efficiency is constantly undermined by grubby reality in the form of Den and Kim, the ward sister and nurse who have to dish out the drugs, shuffle the beds and "wipe the bums". Scanlan's Den is a jumble of kindness, daydreams, delusion and loneliness whose pregnancy this year made her even more distracted and vulnerable - but Kim is our eyes and heart, thanks to Brand's selfless performance.

Getting On gives Kim no comic traits apart from weary bluntness and a drab home life, hinted at in phone calls about running out of fish fingers and ketchup. While the funny, absurd stuff was happening to Pepperdine and Scanlan, Brand represented the show's frustrated compassion, buffeted by bureaucratic idiocy and often disobeying orders to do little favours for the patients or avoid another dirty, pointless task.

Kim's attempt to become a doctor was crushed in mundane fashion: she didn't have the time or ability to pass the relevant course. The last episode had emotional pay-offs for Dr Moore and Den, earnt through careful but unobtrusive series-long plotting, that gave the characters new depth. Kim just bumbled off home as usual but, BBC4 budgets willing, she'll be back to win more tiny victories against depressing odds.