Up The Women

Rebecca Front stars in Up the Women, written by Jessica Hynes, who co-penned the rather brilliant Spaced (1999-2001) but who, strangely, has never received the same acclaim as her co-writer Simon Pegg.

Up the Women is traditional in its format - it's set mostly in one room, in this instance a village hall where the Bunbury Intricate Crafts Circle meet. It's 1910, and one of BICC's members, Margaret (Hynes) has been seduced by Suffragettism while on a day trip to London. The group's self-appointed bossy-boots leader Helen (Front), meanwhile, is having none of it when Margaret meekly suggests the group might support women's emancipation - "Women should not have the vote. We are simple, emotional creatures."

Margaret is a brainy woman who has long since accepted that women must always defer to men, even those markedly less intelligent, and a good running gag involved her explaining electricity to the overbearing caretaker (Adrian Scarborough), who was struggling to fit a new-fangled lightbulb.

The characters - particularly Vicki Pepperdine's toothy spinster - are drawn in broad strokes, and occasionally the humour (peonies being misheard for penis, for instance) is groaningly obvious. But there are some neat lines too, and superb acting from a fantastic cast who look like they're enjoying themselves, including Judy Parfitt doing a nice turn as Helen's decidedly naughty mother, Myrtle, sexually liberated long before the term was invented by the Pankhursts' spiritual daughters. Worth staying with.

Written by and starring Jessica Hynes, Up the Women is a gentle, charming sitcom set in 1910, and follows the transformation of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle into a branch of the suffragette movement.

Hynes plays the group's timidly radical leader Margaret, fiercely opposed by Rebecca Front's redoubtable matriarch Helen. "What on earth do women need a vote for?" Helen argues. "My husband votes for who I tell him to vote for. What could be a better system than that?"

The script is full of many fine lines, plus one excellent visual gag involving a tapestry of peonies, but it's all rather static, with the action - if action be the word - confined to a solitary village hall location and looking set to stay there.

However, the whole series is a mere three episodes long, so the chances of viewers developing cabin fever are minimal.

New sitcom from Jessica Hynes (Spaced). It's 1910 and the quietly intellectual Margaret (Hynes) is keen to convert fellow members of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle to the ways of women's suffrage. They include the group's formidable leader Helen (Rebecca Front), her outrageous mother Emily, perpetually pregnant Eva and the unfortunately toothed Gwen. The cast utilise every iota of their impressive comic timing, but despite the combination of Hynes, Front and feminism, the jokes are far too gentle.

Jessica Hynes leads from the front as Margaret in this jolly suffragette sitcom. A woman whose scientific mind and political aspirations are racing ahead of her fellow stitchers in the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle, Margaret is eager to embrace the modern world of 1910. A recent convert to the suffragette cause, can Margaret convince her circle to square up and join the fight for women's votes? Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine and Ryan Sampson lend varying degrees of support.

Jessica Hynes moves as far as she can from her buzzword-spewing PR wonk in Twenty Twelve with a self-penned sitcom set in a church hall in Banbury in 1910. Hynes is Margaret, a mouse about to roar: she wants the other women in the local craft circle to put down their tapestries and agitate for women's suffrage.

It's a static, traditional affair. In episode one at least, we never leave the hall and its adjoining kitchen, and despite an army of additional gag-writers on the credits, you're more likely to smile creakily than laugh. But, gently, the foundations of something good are in place.

Rebecca Front and Vicki Pepperdine are terrific as a frosty antagonist and buck-toothed naïf respectively, Hynes is great as ever, and the central point - that the silly sexism of the time is still with us - lends it some edge.

Jessica Hynes: it's OK to poke fun at suffragettes

As her new sitcom Up the Women launches on BBC Four, Jessica Hynes explains why feminism can now be funny.

Jessica Hynes's first full-series sitcom since Spaced could hardly be more different: old-fashioned, a little stagey and reminiscent of Dad's Army with its band of carefully characterised misfits playing a bit part in serious events of global significance.

Hynes is Margaret, leading a superb cast including Rebecca Front (whose embittered luddite conservative is a highlight), Vicki Pepperdine and Judy Parfitt as the ladies of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. The hot debate of the day (that day being in 1910) rapidly moves from tiffin provisions to whether or not to take up the suffragette cause after Margaret returns from London bursting with politely revolutionary zeal.

The performances are game (especially from Pepperdine, shelving any vanity rather magnificently), but the satire nibbles rather than bites; it's resolutely warm, gentle stuff, lacking a little polish and a big comic set-piece. Even so, it's a concept rich with potential and Hynes has more than earned our indulgence with her performance in Twenty Twelve.

Jessica Hynes on her new sitcom Up The Women

"You think of Emily Davison as the only martyr, but it was all quite serious. It was no longer Carry On Up the Suffrage. I was crying into my tea..."

Not a knockabout gag-fest but it is still impressive

Margaret, Hynes' character in this self-penned project, is light years from PR dimwit Siobhan in Twenty Twelve.