Ladies Of Letters

Maureen Lipman describes the two characters in Ladies Of Letters as "lonely and desperate women ... who've driven everyone else away. And we don't like each other very much." This delightfully mean but gentle comedy has already been on ITV3, and it's hard to resist the misanthropic, Alan Bennett stylings of the correspondence between Lipman's Irene and Anne Reid's Vera. Series two begins with enough sherries to sink a small army, and Vera shacked up in a caravan park.

Ladies of Letters is forever a hair's breadth from outright panto. Tonight, Irene in Melbourne is beset by some cartoonish business with possums, ending up with a pirate's eye patch, and Vera whizzes inelegantly down a playground slide to the strains of Entrance of the Gladiators. But the spiky scripts of Hayman and Wakefi eld always root things just the right side of the fence, as does the bouncy playing of Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid. There's plenty of bite in the comedy, while the contrast in the ladies' missives adds poignancy. Irene's bravado about her inattentive beau Vincent (Jonathan Coy) is a model of concealment, while Vera's jottings are much more honest and, with her defences worn away, she admits to being "hurt and confused".

Vera (Anne Reid) and Irene (Maureen Lipman) exchange their increasingly poisoned pen letters from opposite sides of the globe as the new series continues. While Vera languishes in a caravan park, Irene has jetted to Oz to visit family, although she's focusing most of her attention on the local grape varieties. The two old bats delight in belittling and deflating each other at every click of the keyboard. (They've graduated to email now.) But their veiled affection for one another makes this so much more than two old snakes, hissing at one another.

A welcome return for combative correspondents Irene and Vera. Their world tour ended with the pensioners vowing never to speak or write to each other again. Five years on, the ice has thawed, and they reunite at the funeral of an ageing lothario with whom both had dallied. "The village is buzzing with rumours that he was taking Niagara," sniffs Irene. But after a whisky at the wake and an attempted paso doble with a guest, Vera ends up with a broken tooth and a leg in plaster. As well as an incensed Irene at her beck and call... In a comedy that combines waspish turns of phrase with cartoon-like visual asides, Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman are an absolute delight. If one-upmanship were an Olympic event, V and I would both occupy the highest podium. Trying to push each other off.

Ladies Of Letters is the kind of small-scale treat that is exactly what the multitude of tiny channels should be doing but so rarely do. Essentially it's splendid actors Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid bitching and bickering, then rubbing along, in a series of loosely linked comic monologues. It owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Bennett's Talking Heads and there's no higher praise than that.

The running joke is that the Ladies in question, Vera and Irene, are friends who like to pretend they are enemies; they can't be doing with each other but they can't do without. It's a gentle essay in the nature of loneliness, cloaked in a thorny cardy of spiky insults. Best joke? Vera's gay farmer son Howard calling his sheep Lady Baa-Baa.

A welcome return for combative correspondents Irene and Vera. Their world tour ended with the pensioners vowing never to speak or write to each other again. Five years on, the ice has thawed, and they reunite at the funeral of an ageing lothario with whom both had dallied. "The village is buzzing with rumours that he was taking Niagara," sniffs Irene. But after a whisky at the wake and an attempted paso doble with a guest, Vera ends up with a broken tooth and a leg in plaster. As well as an incensed Irene at her beck and call... In a comedy that combines waspish turns of phrase with cartoon-like visual asides, Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman are an absolute delight. If one-upmanship were an Olympic event, V and I would both occupy the highest podium. Trying to push each other off.

ITV3 gets another series of Ladies Of Letters, where the talent of Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman adds a shine to an already fun script. We kick off with Vera and Irene talking again five years after their disastrous World Trip, when a funeral of a "Niagra"-eating old-boy lothario brings them together. Superb.

This sitcom about two mismatched widows who forge a friendship initially through exchanging letters certainly has its moments, mostly thanks to the performances of Maureen Lipman as Irene and Anne Reid as Vera. As season two opens, the two meet up at a funeral where Vera manages to disgrace herself.

The Ladies behind "the Letters"

What started out as a simple game of written improvisation from the brilliant minds of writers Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman, blossomed into four books, ten radio series and now a television series that's getting ready to enter its second season. Tellyspotting recently caught up with both Lou and Carole for an exclusive interview.

(Part 2 of the interview)

Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman interview

As Ladies of Letters returns on ITV3, Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman explain how TV fails older viewers.