Sally4Ever

BAFTAs: line between comedy & drama more blurred

Hard to categorise, but I'd say Killing Eve, by Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was a comedy-drama. If you believed it was meant to be a straight thriller, I can see how you might be nonplussed.

Review 2018: Top TV 2018

I don't know what it says about the times we are living in but comedy seems to have slipped into all sorts of programmes this year. I've kept my choices to more traditional comedies.

It is easy to forget just how little Julia Davis cares for what the audience might call "taste" or "decency". Davis plays Emma, a narcissist confronting middle-age by removing any moral boundaries that remain in her life. This includes having sexual relations with her lover's best friend's husband. And when I say "relations", I mean something more sordid than anything I have seen on the small screen before. All of it played for proper, if absolutely excruciating, laughs.

You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today - or at least nobody with the same platform - with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. NB If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.

If you haven't been watching Sally4Ever, I'll make you

It has brought me back to the joys of TV comedy. It's a throwback to that agonising wait for each episode.

Julia Davis' pitiless comedy concludes. Sociopathic Emma (Davis) and fantastically pliant Sally (Catherine Shepherd, who heroically grounds the whole endeavour) are now married and, tonight, they meet the real-life, actual Sean Bean. Then an attack of food poisoning takes an unexpected turn. Few comedies are as unflinching.