This should be brilliant, shouldn’t it? It’s written by Jennifer Saunders, it stars every female comedy actress over the age of 40 (plus Sally Phillips) you can think of, and there’s even David Mitchell thrown in for good measure. Sure, it’s not going to be exactly cutting edge, but it’s going to be well observed, well acted, Dawn French will be a bit silly, and it’ll raise a few giggles. Right? Hmm…..

Well yes, it was quite well observed I guess, the acting was good, and Dawn French was a bit silly. Very silly. But the few giggles? Well they were harder to come by, weren’t they?

There were A Few Giggles, I’ll give them that. Both Eric Morcambe and Christopher Eccelstone have taught us that you can’t go wrong with a bit of fake arm business (it was during his first outing as Doctor Who, if you’re scratching your head, but do keep up) and it raised the first chuckle here too, even in a death scene. As I say, it’s a banker. Plus, the inappropriately harsh vicar made me laugh, as did the idea of a biodegradable coffin – though, when you think about it, that’s not such a bad idea. You may have picked up, by the way, if you didn’t see this, that someone died. Yes, the doctor husband of central character Sal Vine (Sue Johnstone) has been killed off already, spurring Sal on to join the local women’s guild, where we meet some rather strange characters.

And herein lies the problem. On the one hand we have Sal’s storyline played relatively straight, or at least in a Royle Family-esque ‘realist’ fashion, and on the other hand we have Dawn French and Joanna Lumley (who is recognisable, contrary to every single preview I read) hamming it up to a ridiculous degree. French, as Rosie (well, Rosie and Margaret; she seems to have some sort of multiple personality disorder) literally appears to have wandered onto set still in character from a sketch show and everyone likes her too much to say anything. Like, ‘this is meant to be subtle, Dawn’.  Maybe it is meant to be outrageous and it’s actually Sue Johnstone who’s got it wrong. That’s the problem, there’s no way of knowing. It wasn’t awful, and it definitely wasn’t great, but it certainly confused me. [annawaits]