Roger & Val Have Just Got In

Alfred Molina and Dawn French slip back into the comfy shoes of oddly harmonious couple Roger and Val in the comedy that wryly ponders the minutiae of daily life. They've just got in from a weekend at a hotel. In between learning about their exploits, we're treated to a spectacle featuring three remarkable women: Martina Navratilova, Hillary Clinton and Margaret The Apprentice Mountford.

Fix yourself a plate of fish fingers and a glass of wine: the Stevensons are back. Not that anyone will notice much: when this quietly brilliant comic-drama about the minutiae of a marriage ran in 2010 it caused barely a ripple, but those of us who loved it, loved it.

If you're coming to it fresh, don't expect Terry and June. The inspirations are nearer Mike Leigh or Alan Bennett: closely-observed human foibles with a vein of tragedy just below the surface. Val (Dawn French) is a cookery teacher. Roger (Alfred Molina) was a horticulturalist until he lost his job. Buried in their past - but ever present - is the memory of a child who died as a baby.

Tonight they're just back from a wedding, and we follow the usual niggles and shared jokes, their views on old songs, the correct timing of meals, Sunday papers, and the best way to unpack. Roger is haunted by the prospect of his employment tribunal while Val might be up for the deputy headship. It's that kind of show.

Dawn French on 'Roger & Val Have Just Got In'

Dawn French talks to Viv Groskopf about BBC Two's Roger & Val Have Just Got In, the break-up of her marriage and being photographed in Ann Summers.

The one-set, two-actors formula is unchanged and the pleasure undiminished in the second series of a show for which the term 'sitcom' seems ever less appropriate. Alfred Molina and Dawn French's married couple aren't especially funny, but they are acutely recognisable, and the dialogue, setting and studied on-screen naturalism (a couple of hammy moments excepted) lend it a sort of sub-Beckettian weight. Although series one implied that Roger and Val had addressed their long-buried grief over their deceased baby, a wedding, a job interview and a dismissal hearing expose further emotional faultlines amid the idle banter about ageing, loo hygiene and the etiquette of unpacking. An intriguing, ambiguous cliffhanger bodes well.

The most startling development as this gentlest of series returns for a second run is that Roger (Alfred Molina) has finally had a proper shave. Ironic, really, as now he's unemployed he could just slob around the house all day in a curry-stained vest if he really felt like it.

But he and Val (Dawn French) have just got in from a wedding, which could go some way to explaining his newfound love for spruceness.

Amid the usual ­inconsequential banter this week about Little Chefs and lamps, we find Roger obsessing about his looming employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, and Val hoping for a shot at becoming deputy head.

Devotees will know better than to expect proper laughs but, amazingly, we actually get one tonight when Val demonstrates how she's preparing for her interview with the help of a cleverly customised cardboard box. You might even be tempted to give it a go yourself.

Alfred Molina and Dawn French are back as the incredibly inactive couple of the title. This week sees Roger and Val returning from a wedding, and much musing on Roger's forthcoming tribunal, and the prospect of a new job for Val. There are in-jokes, debates, reminiscences on anything and everything - except the still-ached-for loss of their baby.

The whole thing is a blatant homage to Alan Bennett's glorious soliloquies of Cream Cracker under the Settee and co, with the silences as telling as the humour, and it's best to go in viewing with that kind of gentle, undulating, un-fireworky telly treat in mind.

Roger & Val Have Just Got In (BBC2) is back for another series. I'm surprised, I have to say. I simply don't get it, though I know it has its admirers. It's a beautifully observed portrait of everyday life and a relationship, they say, poignant and touching. I could switch off the telly and look in the living room mirror for that, I say; I want a bit more from a drama; it's boring. It's well acted by Dawn French and Alfred Molina, they say. OK, they can have that. It's Mike Leigh, they say. It's not, it's Mike Leigh-Lite, Mike Leigh Zero. This has neither the grit nor the humour of Mike Leigh.

Perhaps I'm being old-fashioned, but the dearth of jokes is a slight problem for me - if this is a comedy, as I'm led to believe. It's a sitcom, without the com. It's a sit. Or a sit-through, because rarely has half an hour felt so long.

Roger and Val Have Just Got In review: In or out?

Roger & Val is not as quirky or profound as it thinks it is, so to prevent the observational turning into the plain dull, the trivia-tennis must be shaken up with a few transformative events and cliff-hangers. But don't worry, not enough for you to spill your tea.

Why Roger and Val just can't be bettered

Jack Seale welcomes the return of a uniquely great sitcom.

One Foot In The Grave had a suppressed secret, mentioned only once, that the Meldrews had a child who had died. There is less reticence in Roger & Val Have Just Got In - the sitcom's second series began with a resume which included Roger's tragic observation that he had been a father for "five and a half weeks."

The bereavement is not something they like to discuss much but it does answer the question of why, like so many sitcom couples, they are childless and... we can see with its protagonists obsession with trivia as a form of displacement. It certainly, I felt, informed last night's references to the 'bleakness' of their home, a bleakness that could be offset only by packing away their baggage (Roger & Val had just returned from a wedding) and turning off the overhead lights in favour of kinder lighting.

Emma and Beth Kilcoyne's writing contains wonderful lines that captures the pair's more or less comfortable isolation. Val, looking at The Observer, complained that it was like "15 other people coming into the house all jabbering for my attention." They are all delivered perfectly. Not many people other than Alfred Molina could say, "Rolf Harris doing what he does very well" without sounding idiotic. He is superb, but Dawn French's is the riskier performance. When he gently mocks her hopes of becoming a Deputy Headmistress by citing Bob Marley's I Shot The Sheriff (but I did not shoot the Deputy) she responds by shouting Come On Eileen so aggressively it takes a second to realise she is singing. My only criticism concerns the box-on-Val's-head gags that play to the gallery. There is no gallery. This is BBC Two.