Roger & Val Have Just Got In

As a newlywed, I thought at first that there could be no worse choice of viewing than Roger and Val Have Just Got In (BBC Two, Friday), a docile new sitcom featuring Dawn French and the Hollywood actor Alfred Molina as the fiftysomething married couple in the title. So this is what lies in store after the honeymoon tan has faded? Endless grey years of getting in from work, putting the kettle on and squabbling over who did what with the Hoover guarantee?

All was not, however, entirely how it seemed. Instead of emphasising the mundane nature of middle-class, suburban married life in order to mock it, Office-style, this was in fact a quiet homage to the things that make a relationship work.

The premise for the series is simple: each episode covers the half-hour after Roger and Val get home from their slightly cuddly jobs. Val is a "food technology" schoolteacher and Roger is a botanist at a garden centre. They compare notes on their day and, in the first episode, hunted for a guarantee whose disappearance forced them to confront the horror of horrors - a filing system known as "the big drawer".

Yes, as drama goes there is about as much happening here as there is in Waiting for Godot, or a day of Test cricket, or in Peter Andre's brain, but that is the point. This is a celebration of the soporific.

"If I was to rear up in the wild," said Roger, pondering his professional relationship with a lawyer at work, "she would neither attack me nor eat me. We would rub alongside one another like a lizard and a bat." Val listened to this nonsense indulgently, and Roger in turn humoured her when she launched into a monologue on a woman at school who had "a coat for every type of weather".

The small acts of give and take offered a believable glimpse of a time-worn but working marriage. Not all was low-watt contentment though: a misguided phone call prompted a row, we learnt that Roger's father was seriously ill and there were hints of sadness when the couple referred to their childlessness. Not exactly enough to make anyone cry - or laugh out loud for that matter - but the layered pettiness and tragedy of a typical afternoon yielded a warm, subtle humour.

Molina managed an impressive transition from movie star battling superheroes in Spider-Man 2 to Mr Average battling a stack of unfiled paperwork. French, meanwhile, was on good, likeable form, though her performance was more likely to evince Vicar of Dibley-style chuckles than French and Saunders raucous shrieks.

By the end, Roger and Val had won me over and I'd stopped having nightmarish hallucinations about spending my silver wedding anniversary staring at a wall. The lack of glitz was charming, in its way. Who'd want to be Sex and the City's Samantha, bonking your way round Manhattan in a succession of silly outfits, when you could be Val, sitting at home with a cup of tea watching your husband mist-spray a potted basil plant?

The new show Roger & Val is not perfect by any means. Sometimes the performances tip over a trifle into sitcom mannerism, and there's a slight, odd stillness to the direction that sometimes makes it feel a little claustrophobic.

But that may be the intent; the show is based on the 1st half hour after a couple Roger & Val get home from work: the bit where two lives re-merge, in a swirl of eddies and cross currents. As such, it's a purposefully small world - a two hander between Alfred Molina and Dawn French, playing with a dense, multi-layered, tapestry-fine script. You can see why Molina and French - neither exactly desperate for work - went for the roles. Unlike most sitcoms, you genuinely don't know what's going to happen next: a fairly extraordinary turn of events when the first episode revolves around Roger & Val merely looking through their 'big drawer' for the guarantee for the Hoover.

Roger's too-interested mention of Angela from Legal is worked in with exquisite poised delicacy - like a Victorian micro-mosaic brooch. The build up to a wholly inappropriate phone call to her lands as sure footed as a tiger. And by the time Val goes temporarily insane - tearing up the hoover guarantee and throwing it all over the garage floor - you have your hand over your mouth in shock. At this point I feel excited about next week's episode. Almost nervous. It feels like it has a whole, dark, alarming world to explore just in Roger & Val's kitchen.

I suppose Roger & Val Have Just Got In (Friday, BBC Two) qualifies as a sitcom, but somehow this does it a disservice. Alfred Molina and Dawn French play a married couple who spend their time chatting in an apparently inconsequential way. In the first episode, they also went through their drawers looking for a guarantee for their vacuum cleaner.

Beth Kilcoyne and Emma Kilcoyne's script was beautifully observed - and superbly performed by Molina and French. This too had a washed-out sort of look. It was only slowly that Roger and Val's colour, and their idiosyncrasies, came to the surface. The show wasn't roaringly funny, but then it doesn't set out to be. Instead it's charming, intriguing and full of that rarest of qualities, emotional truth.

Which leaves us with the gentle sitcom Roger & Val Have Just Got In to keep us away from the barbequeue. And you know, it may just succeed. The cruel would suggest that this is a sort of middlebrow update of Terry & June: middle class couple come home from work & talk about the petty vicissitudes of life; the trivial, the mildly irritating.

The first episode involved them looking for a guarantee for a vacuum cleaner in a drawer filled with household detritus. That was it: nothing more. And it worked. The script was fine and restrained and even on occasion approached the level of Alan Bennett. But the real pleasure was in the performances of Dawn French and Alfred Molina, which were lovely, quite exquisite. Mind you, I write as someone who adored the Vicar of Dibley and thinks Dawn French can do no wrong.

Dawn French and Alfred Molina star in this downbeat new sitcom. As the title suggests, it's about a couple pottering around at home in the first half-hour after work, winding down, putting the kettle on, thinking about death, that sort of thing: Beckett with a nice biscuit. Tonight's opener revolves around a missing vacuum cleaner receipt, legal issues at work and the threat of the Big Drawer.

This is a strange new comedy series. It depicts a middle-aged couple during the half-hour after they get in from work. Dawn French plays Val, a waddling teacher of "food technology" whose level of expertise is not so much Auguste Escoffier as King Alfred. Her devoted, slightly simple botanist husband Roger is played by Alfred Molina - more often seen in Hollywood blockbusters than chamber comedy these days - who manfully wrestles with a succession of trite homilies and telegraphed gags in his role.

Shot vérité style and in real time, drained of colour and canned laughter, the programme attempts to underpin its gentle observational humour with the pathos of childless marriage, but only occasionally succeeds. Too often the dialogue, in its desire to appear simultaneously portentous and amusing, instead falls in the gap between funny and moving.

Written by twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne, Roger and Val... in some ways exemplifies the great BBC quandary: how do you remind the public that their £145.50 a year is not being entirely wasted on executives, while also making them laugh and all the while continuing to employ Dawn French? Head of Comedy Mark Freeland has conceded that "not everyone will get it". I fear that unless you've sweated out long nights hoping that Marion and Geoff would breed with The Vicar of Dibley, you'll fall into the "not everyone" camp.

Notionally a sitcom, this series defies easy categorisation. It's not funny, though its portrait of a comfortably long marriage may provoke the odd smile of recognition, and it's not particularly substantial. It is, though, rather sweet. Alfred Molina and Dawn French are Roger and Val, a devoted, mildly chaotic couple whose complete familiarity with each other's personality tics and traits means they're happily at ease as they chat about the day's events. Nothing happens. The first episode centres on Val's determination to find the guarantee for a broken vacuum cleaner, which leads them both to reminisce as they sort through the accretions of married life - the aged bills, bank statements and holiday souvenirs. As they do so, we glimpse snippets of their personalities. Roger is a febrile, nervy pedant, while Val is a worrier. They both want to rebel, even in tiny ways, but they can't summon the energy. Molina and French make it work; in lesser hands it would just fizzle away.

This gentle comedy has been bouncing around the schedules for months, but has finally landed on Friday nights. Starring Dawn French and Alfred Molina as a comfortably-married middle-aged couple it's far from laugh-out-loud, but an entertaining insight into long-term relationships; we're hoping it's a grower.

We've long looked forward to this Dawn French and Alfred Molina sitcom and it doesn't disappoint. Roger and Val Stevenson are an ordinary middle-aged husband and wife whose lives, feelings and prejudices are revealed in splendid little snapshots as they obsess over mundane, everyday minutiae. In this series opener they've lost the guarantee to their vacuum cleaner, which prompts Val to think deeply about existence and the afterlife, and engage in her own form of corporate protest.

If you liked Rev, you might also enjoy Roger and Val - another comedy whose selling point is that it's not trying to be funny.

To be honest, I don't know why the BBC doesn't admit this is a drama and be done with it. Even Dawn French, who stars in it and whose idea it was, has described it as "a tragedy". Perhaps they're trying to hook passing Vicar Of Dibley fans.

It's a two-hander with French and Alfred Molina as a comfortably married couple. We spend half an hour with them in real time, at the point when they have just got in from work and are catching up with one another. And watching it is like eavesdropping on old friends as they natter away about nothing much in particular.

Tonight, they are looking for the guarantee for their vacuum cleaner. Inevitably, as they search through the clutter of their lives, some painful personal issues surface as well.