Radio Times review

This sitcom from Richard Pinto (Citizen Khan) will be clasped to the bosom of anyone who loves New Tricks, as Boomers centres on a group of old-timers, friends from years back, who find themselves out of kilter with the modern world.

The humour is broad and painted with the widest brush strokes and there are echoes of Victor Meldrew's curmudgeonly head-butting against the idiocies of political correctness and life in general. The cast includes some solid comedy names, including Russ Abbot as the dourest member of the group and Nigel Planer as the wide boy with the newly acquired young Eastern European wife (feel free to let out a weary groan).

The women (Alison Steadman, Paula Wilcox, Stephanie Beacham) always win out in any given situation as their hopeless blokes go to the pub. In the opening episode, everyone gathers at a funeral.

The final episode of this amiable comedy drama is nicely bittersweet, and we are left with the feeling that life in the Paradise family will continue to be turbulent, long after the credits have rolled. But, though it's been a good-natured six weeks, I'm not sure I want to see any more. Sometimes, you know, things just end and that's fine.

Pauline Paradise (Alison Steadman) continues to carve a new life away from her dull, lugubrious husband Ken (Duncan Preston). He, in turn, decides he must move on and takes steps to get rid of all traces of his estranged wife, which doesn't go down well with the rest of the family. Meanwhile, horrible, self-obsessed Heather confides her big secret in her nearest and dearest. Uh-oh.

A toe-curling date was the centrepiece of Love And Marriage, when retired lollipop lady Pauline (Alison Steadman) went for a drink and a movie with widowed teacher Peter (Bruce Alexander).

We know that Pauline is a dating novice - she's only been out with one man, and she's been married to him for 40 years. But last week she left him, and moved in with her flighty sister (Celia Imrie), who really should have explained some dating basics. Such as, if your hubby phones you during the date, don't answer. And if you do answer, don't have a blazing row. And if you do have a blazing row, remember that your date can hear everything you're saying about him.

The show is fragmenting into a collection of sketches, starring energetic but two-dimensional characters. The most interesting is daughter Heather (Niky Wardley), boiling with jealousy if her younger husband even speaks to another woman.

There's a sort of charm about Pauline's car-mad husband Ken, too. When Heather tells him she's just seen her mum being whisked off for her date in Peter's flashy E-Type Jaguar, Ken looks torn between feeling hurt and being impressed. 'E-Type? What year?' he asks.

Pauline's sister is thoroughly dislikable - the sort of shallow, brittle schemer that Imrie plays so well. Envious for decades of her sibling's happy marriage, she's delighted to help break it up. 'You've left a world of pain, not a man,' she assures Pauline.

This is the sort of comedy-drama that signals its 60-something characters are Being Free and Living Life, by having them blow up a space hopper and bounce round the living room. But like Dates [Channel 4's drama], it needs to start tying its story strands together.

Love And Marriage is a new comedy-drama on ITV which, in that very ITV way, pinches from other shows. The characters - members of the extended Paradise family - sit on sofas and talk directly to the camera about themselves and their aspirations. You'll remember this from Modern Family. Very soon, there's an opportunity for some golden-oldies, grab-it-before-you-end-up-potted-heid romance. You'll remember this from Last Tango In Halifax. All of this is almost shameless even though Love And Marriage doesn't actually steal from Shameless. I wouldn't mind if it brought something new to the busy kitchen table of interwoven laughter-and-tears clan sagas, but I'm not sure it does.

It's a show of over-enthusiastic pub quizzes, congas starting in the conservatory and continuing right round the garden and christenings with the middle name "Beyoncé". Alison Steadman is the always-giving matriarch Pauline with a batty father, a husband who barely communicates, a son always borrowing money - and a free-spirit sister who's acquired almost as many husbands as her house has bedrooms (seven). Thus, when Pauline retires as a school ­lollipop lady, she ­decides: "Stuff the lot of you." She may not be back and ­neither might I.

New comedy-drama Love and Marriage starred Alison Steadman as newly retired lollipop lady Pauline. We knew that Pauline was put upon because she was laden down with carrier bags, which also worked as metaphor for her bustling, self-absorbed extended family (including Extras' Ashley Jensen).

Pauline's husband, "Silent Ken" (Duncan Preston), had a face like a wet Wednesday and the conversational skills of undercoat. When he refused to comfort Pauline after her father died, nobody would have blamed her for lunging at him with her lollipop. Instead, Pauline became one of those "silver splitters" beloved of the Daily Mail, leaving Ken to live with her free-spirited sister (Celia Imrie), and declaring: "I'm not going to be a daughter or a wife or a mother any more." There's an audience for the likes of Love and Marriage, but it verged on meandering and urgently needs to pep up. I was left with the feeling that I'd been watching a stellar cast making ham sandwiches for an hour.

"Secrets in a marriage are like dry rot in a house," opines newly retired lollipop lady Pauline Paradise (Alison Steadman) to an off-screen interviewer. Her husband Ken (Duncan Preston), slumped beside her on the sofa in a near-permanent state of catatonic disengagement, concurs.

As do the rest of the extended Paradise family, their homes visited in turn by this shamelessly contrived but extremely convenient narrative device, which throws into stark relief the shared veneer of domestic contentment with the cauldron of deceit, disappointment and dissatisfaction bubbling beneath.

There is - you guessed it - trouble in the Paradises, and ITV's new comedy drama Love and Marriage will be here over the next six weeks to chronicle it.

There were an awful lot of Paradises to introduce, with an awful lot of back stories to establish, so episode one was rather obliged to sacrifice subtlety on the altar of exposition.

When characters weren't sharing information with the camera they were frequently to be found telling each other things they already knew - "You were a top model in the 1970s" - for the benefit of viewers at home. During the first 20 minutes, the top-rate cast waded heroically through a mud slide of explanatory dialogue, with the threat of submersion beneath a wave of audience impatience never more than a line away.

Shortly after the first ad break, however, they hit dry land. The storylines kicked in, the dialogue came alive - "She keeps saying my name as if she's never heard it before and doesn't like the sound of it" - and proceedings began to gather a satisfying pace.

The Paradise clan, we learnt, are beset by a multitude of problems - financial, emotional, domestic, professional, romantic, historic - which they look to matriarch Pauline to either solve or shoulder.

Following the accidental death of her father, the much-put-upon Pauline reassesses her life and rejects all the roles imposed upon her. To everyone's amazement, including her own, she ups sticks, moves in with her racy younger sister and starts telephoning potential new suitors at two o'clock in the morning.

Despite its remorselessly jaunty soundtrack, Love and Marriage explored some sombre themes and was all the more interesting for it. Steadman's performance drives the drama, but she has excellent support from a stellar cast that also includes Ashley Jensen, Larry Lamb and Celia Imrie.

If not quite hooked, I shall stick with the series, if only to find out why the Paradise family's quiz team didn't get a point for correctly identifying The Constant Gardener as Rachel Weisz's Oscar-winning vehicle.

Love and Marriage, ITV's new six-part comedy drama, was about sacrifice. Alison Steadman played Pauline Paradise, a 60-year-old matriarch, who had spent her whole adult life caring for her large family and receiving not-very-much thanks in return.

When she left the house on her last day before retiring, her taciturn husband Ken (Duncan Preston) didn't even look up from his paper. When her father died, he went to bed and hoped she wouldn't want to talk about it. And Pauline and Ken were not the only ones with problems. Their offspring were all in trouble. Kevin, their eldest son, was in debt and newly redundant; Heather, their highly strung daughter, was racing against the biological clock to get pregnant; and Martin, their youngest son, was worn out by the demands of his huge family.

And that's just the "drama" half of this "comedy drama". To squeeze in the humour as well was asking a lot of writer Stewart Harcourt and, on the evidence of the first episode, perhaps a bridge too far. It's difficult to be funny when you're so busy establishing characters and plot (although including a joke about the Manson family, the subject of biting satire forty years ago, was pretty desperate).

So there are grounds for optimism. As we get to know the Paradise clan better, the jokes will hopefully improve. In the meantime, the drama should keep people tuning in.

Gentle family dramas? They're bloody everywhere at the moment. Second series of The Cafe and Starlings are imminent on Sky. Frankie ambles on over on BBC1. And then there's this new offering in which Alison Steadman's long-suffering matriarch Pauline Paradise (whose name makes her sound more like a drag queen) decides - on the occasion of her father's funeral, no less - that she's fed up of producing party spreads, lending money, providing endless, one-way emotional support and spending time with her silent husband. Instead, she's going to bugger off and live with her sister; her brood can stand on their own two feet for once.

Initial signs aren't good - jaunty piano music signposts everything and the increasingly worn-out narrative device of characters delivering documentary-style pieces-to-camera feels lazy. But Steadman is a trooper, even in a role she could probably play in her sleep and, by the end, it just about feels worth hanging on for another episode. It's an extremely close run thing, though...

Alison Steadman shines in this over-complicated show

I think my issues with Love and Marriage started almost instantly as writer Stewart Harcourt introduced the various members of the Paradise family by having the couples introduce themselves straight to camera.