review

In the best sitcoms the characters convince you of their reality, and so you can imagine an afterlife for them once the scriptwriter moved on to greener pastures. That's why an anniversary reunion of the boys from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum would work: ditto Dad's Army, if only the entire cast weren't already sampling another form of afterlife; and why the Likely Lads returned after seven years away. But whatever happened to the Liver Birds? (BBC1).

There's a logic to the revival of Carla Lane's flatshare sitcom. The central theme was the pursuit of the perfect mate: we're entitled to wonder if either ever found him. Even so, you slightly wonder just how deeply Beryl and Sandra merit the 20-years-on treatment. This sounds ageist, but there's something faintly toe-curling about a pair of 50-year-old single women fixated on men. These days, they're both divorced and disappointed - Beryl by penury, Sandra by having to live with her stuck-up (and resoundingly unfunny) mother. By halfway through episode one, Beryl is lodging in the upstairs flat, and they've reoccupied their old sparring roles: wistful Sandra versus saucy Beryl.

These being the 1990s, Beryl can be slightly saucier. In the old days she never used to say "shitty", nor explain with quite such relish why thick carpet is known as shagpile. And yet there's something unresolved about the dialogue's updating: when Beryl admits to being "flipping well stressed out", there's a weird incongruence between modern jargon and a coy, pre-watershed euphemism.

As for the gag-chasing, old habits die hard: Lane is still gratuitously introducing offstage characters purely to get a canned laugh out of them. Of her ex-husband, Sandra says: "The only thing he brought into my life was fleas"; of her time dating an undertaker, Beryl recalls: "If I moved suddenly it made him jump". Giving them a history of dating unbelievable men just doesn't make it any easier to believe in the women.

In fact, while Sandra has pickled in aspic, Beryl's life story has been worked on in much more detail, in a way that gives the project a troublesome imbalance. Though she tells Sandra she's childless, we learn that Beryl has a joy-riding son in a juvenile detention centre. The episode closed with her in silhouette on her bed, sobbing her way into an entirely different genre. It suggests that the BBC hasn't really decided why it wanted to resuscitate The Liver Birds: nostalgia, desperation, genuine curiosity or, most likely, the participants had a few bills to pay.

No problem with bothering to believe a word of The Lord of Misrule, (BBC1) but it was still a much more sure-footed affair, even if every character ambled around on invisible stilts. Writer Guy Jenkin even gave early warning of this tendency: when we met the tabloid hound charged with getting his paws on the former Lord Chancellor's depth-charged memoirs, he was perched on a scaffolded platform trying to get a shot of Gazza's hospital bedroom.

Jenkin delivers this sort of V-sign satire in his sleep: the beans the Government wants to keep unspilled include the secret of Peter Lilley and the vacuum cleaner, Mrs Thatcher's suppressed psychiatric records, Prince Charles and his not remotely military tattoo. But unlike A Very Open Prison, which reacted rapidly to specific news items, the background had been painted in. The troop of metropolitans invading pagan Cornwall recalled the passage in Scoop where Lord Copper's beleaguered emissary sorties into deepest Somerset. And, needless to say, the performances were unimpeachable. As for Richard Wilson's old manure-stirrer, who really did have one foot in the grave, no one else could have been so wilfully cantankerous and still held a grip on your affection. What with the subplot involving a marijuana haul, it should win the Bafta for Best Mellow Drama.