Bucket

Bucket tries too hard to make us squirm

Miriam Margolyes plays Mim - a maddening, loud, eccentric old woman - in this new sitcom.

She's celebrating her 70th birthday (70 is the new 30, she insists) by working her way through a bucket list, and the first item is a holiday with her irritable daughter. Other plans include: "Kiss a frog on Lake Titicaca."

Mim is crude, and absolutely blind to everyone's discomfort as she gossips about sex and her daughter's masturbation habits.

Frog Stone plays Fran, her drab and weary daughter. Her only hope in life is that she'll quietly get the promotion she wants, but Mim barges in and is intent on forcing some colour and activity into her existence.

The comedy tries to make us cringe on poor Fran's behalf, but often goes too far and sounds like a grubby schoolboy wrote it, with lines such as "Would you rather dry hump Ann Widdecombe or rim Donald Trump?"

TV review: Bucket

I was worried this was going to be soppy, sentimental and full of growing old disgracefully cliches. And while there is certainly plenty of that, there is much more edge and depth to it than expected.

Bucket: BBC Four review

Bucket has a proudly female viewpoint without excluding the other half of the population. But its main appeal is that it offers prime Margolyes, always a force of nature to be savoured.

Bucket: tenderness, fury, and lashings of gynaecology

You were entitled to feel confused by the opening credits to Bucket (BBC Four). It's a new sitcom which shares its name with a celebrated gargoyle from an old sitcom. Imagine if someone wrote a comedy called Mainwaring or Meldrew. And then there was the epigraph from T S Eliot, not commonly associated with ribtickling hilarity.