Preview - Bucket

A sitcom starring Miriam Margolyes sounds like it should be recipe for success.

Go Jetters to air on China Central Television (CCTV)

BBC Worldwide today announced a deal with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that will bring highly rated CBeebies series Go Jetters to over 1.1 billion viewers in China. Fully dubbed in Mandarin and subtitled in simplified Chinese, the 50-episode series will premiere at the end of May on CCTV-14 - the children's channel that is part of China Central Television (CCTV).

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Blackadder actor Sir Tony Robinson has branded the hit sitcom's first series "a bit s***".

Bucket tries too hard to make us squirm

Miriam Margolyes plays Mim - a maddening, loud, eccentric old woman - in this new sitcom.

She's celebrating her 70th birthday (70 is the new 30, she insists) by working her way through a bucket list, and the first item is a holiday with her irritable daughter. Other plans include: "Kiss a frog on Lake Titicaca."

Mim is crude, and absolutely blind to everyone's discomfort as she gossips about sex and her daughter's masturbation habits.

Frog Stone plays Fran, her drab and weary daughter. Her only hope in life is that she'll quietly get the promotion she wants, but Mim barges in and is intent on forcing some colour and activity into her existence.

The comedy tries to make us cringe on poor Fran's behalf, but often goes too far and sounds like a grubby schoolboy wrote it, with lines such as "Would you rather dry hump Ann Widdecombe or rim Donald Trump?"

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Interview: Rich Hall

Top US comedian and esteemed BBC documentarian Rich Hall returns to Belfast next month for a stand-up show during the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. David Roy spoke to the Virginia-born funnyman about mixing music with comedy

TV review: Bucket

I was worried this was going to be soppy, sentimental and full of growing old disgracefully cliches. And while there is certainly plenty of that, there is much more edge and depth to it than expected.

Lee Mack, Barry Cryer and Richard Osman talk satire

We can only hope The Nightly Show takes the criticism on board and find its own groove when the time comes - assuming human civilisation hasn't already ended, of course.

Bucket: BBC Four review

Bucket has a proudly female viewpoint without excluding the other half of the population. But its main appeal is that it offers prime Margolyes, always a force of nature to be savoured.

Jeffrey Holland replaces Roy Hudd in Waiting For God

Hi-de-Hi favourite Jeffrey Holland has stepped in to play Tom Ballard in a new stage adaptation of TV sitcom Waiting For God. The role had been due to be played by Roy Hudd but he has withdrawn from the production on medical advice due to ill health.

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Bucket: tenderness, fury, and lashings of gynaecology

You were entitled to feel confused by the opening credits to Bucket (BBC Four). It's a new sitcom which shares its name with a celebrated gargoyle from an old sitcom. Imagine if someone wrote a comedy called Mainwaring or Meldrew. And then there was the epigraph from T S Eliot, not commonly associated with ribtickling hilarity.