Anna Chancellor

A repeat for Steve Pemberton's glorious 2014 adaptation of EF Benson's comic novels about a pair of upper-class ladies engaged in elegantly acidic one-upmanship in a 1930s seaside town. Miranda Richardson is sublime as Miss Elizabeth Mapp (sporting, as Spike Milligan would say, great "English teeth, shining in the sun" - along with a sly lunacy lurking just behind the eyes), while Anna Chancellor as the snobbish Mrs Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas makes the perfect foil.

Flowers, which ran through the week on Channel 4, was a true hen's teeth rarity: we were witnessing, I think, the invention of a new genre. I'm just not sure quite what it was. Thorny, yes, prickly and awkward. Bleakly black too. Resoundingly human and truly funny. Above all, the singular vision of show runner (and writer and director and co-star) Will Sharpe, an Anglo-Japanese former Footlights president. What I do know is that I could have watched it all year long.

There were elements of Roald Dahl and Japanese anime, of Black Mirror and of Alan Ayckbourn, of fairytales for children who drink. Essentially the tale of a depressed writer and his savagely dysfunctional family, as the week wore on it became more forgiving. It's a sign of good drama when there's strength in depth of casting, and there were relishably chunky cameos for Angus Wright and Anna Chancellor as the true grotesques of the piece. But the family itself, the Flowers, survived near fatalities and worse to emerge, if not triumphant, then hugely and recognisably normal.

Olivia Colman, now forgiven the occasional misstep in The Night Manager, was back to all her charm and glory. We have grown used to seeing Colman in full-teeth mode, but she'd obviously been hiding a seventh set: no one else can hiss the accusatory "blabbermouth" while still blinding the world with a smile so wide nor so full of brittle self-doubt. Then there was Daniel Rigby as the son who bores everything but the pants off women, and Sophia Di Martino as sis Amy, the tender fulcrum around which much revolves. Above all, Julian Barratt as father Maurice, who conjures worlds of depression from just a pocketful of mumbles. The sadly salient point came on Thursday, when Deborah (Colman) attempted to reach the heart of Maurice's depression: we can fight it, she says, fight the monster together, maybe just with love. A shaggy shake of a sorrowful head. "No. Love just makes it worse." Truthfully, a week-long gem.

Everything you need to know about Flowers

Today Channel 4 announced details of their new dark new sitcom Flowers that partners Broadchurch's Olivia Colman and The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt.

I spent half an hour waiting for one of the villagers to be murdered, and Miss Mapp and Lucia to join forces to solve the mystery. But no. This British comedy of manners set in the 1920s is simply about the social rivalry between the village of Tilling's incumbent busybody Elizabeth Mapp (p]Miranda Richardson]) and exotic blow-in Lucia Lucas (Anna Chancellor). It ain't quite Wodehouse but there's a touch of that mood about it all, and these two fine actresses milk it for all it's worth.

One seasonal highlight was the Mapp and Lucia remake (BBC One) starring Anna Chancellor, Miranda Richardson and most of the cast of The League of Gentlemen. Not having read the original E.F. Benson novels (though, of course, I'm going to now) I couldn't tell you whether this was a grotesque travesty or the very thing, but my family and our New Year's hosts were royally amused. Especially by the 'g'ru'.

In fact, I was so impressed that I very nearly blew out my New Year's Eve party proper so I could stay at home and watch the final episode while everyone else went out and played. Glad I didn't, though, because the party I went to was rather fun, full of charmingly debauched semi-youth telling me useful things, like this game that I think we should all try some time, where you send those Chinese lanterns into the air over your estate, then shoot them down with fireworks from a home-made rocket-launch tube. Were they kidding me or is this actually possible?

Mapp and Lucia was phenomenal, successive nights of the most deliciously moreish television made last year. The adaptation by Steve Pemberton of E.F. Benson's exquisitely flensed comedy of manners, set in Rye in the 1920s/30s (and it really is still that lovely), when a certain rarefied form of life actually depended on a bustling church noticeboard for its every social, spiritual, ethical, sartorial and sexual sustenance, could have been carried by the eponymous leads alone for the whole three nights.

Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women - ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death - caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns. Richardson in particular was again phenomenal; her silent lipsticked mouth spoke volumes. It was rainbowed and beaming when happily and hissily besmirching her "friend" with the sarcastic term "precious one", or even when genuinely happy, high on unkindness, after a rare coup: but its cochineal would plummet, in repose, to a clownish moue, a faded curtain of dried lip-lines rusted with frustration. But Chancellor was no slouch; even though she won 90% of the battles, when scorned her wrath was ungovernable, and would have had 90% of ovaries (and every testicle around) fleeing for the Downs.

As I said, they could have carried it themselves, but there was glorious support. Pemberton himself as proto-gay Georgie; Poppy Miller and Mark Gatiss and Nicholas Woodeson, and Rye itself. The plots, such as they were - a dodgy Indian guru, an art competition, a something involving the Prince of Wales - were negligibly delightful. But the subplots - the mutating fashions for friendships, brief fads, the power of money, benign unacknowledged homosexuality, misappreciated appreciation for what passes for intellect (or class), the joy of witchy bitchiness - never more relevant. E.F. Benson left a little more of a canon than this: please, bring it on, and leave Downton looking like the Titanic after the feet got damp.

Mapp & Lucia review - beautifully tart one-upwomanship

As two 1930s society mavens engaged in increasingly deranged warfare, Anna Chancellor and Miranda Richardson led us gloriously into a world of ludicrous standoffs and Italian hogwashery.

Radio Times review

It's pelting with rain in Tilling, and the dark skies herald bad news for reigning queen of the social scene, Lucia, when she hears that a fluent Italian speaker is to visit and wants to chat.

The conceit is, of course, that Lucia and her confirmed bachelor best friend Georgy Pilson (Anna Chancellor and Steve Pemberton) pretend that they love nothing more than whiling away hours together talking Italian. But they know just a few phrases.

I'm well aware that this sounds like torpid tosh, the kind of petit bourgeois nonsense that maybe people cared about in the 1930s when E.F. Benson wrote his Mapp and Lucia books, but why should anyone bother in the thrusting, connected 21st century?

Maybe they shouldn't, but as a piece of escapist confectionary, this is hard to beat. Au reservoir!

Radio Times review

The piquant minutiae of Tilling make the world of Mapp and Lucia go around. It's about bridge parties and who takes tea with whom. Since Lucia's arrival the social map has been re-drawn now that she dominates its cultural life, to the exclusion of its grinning once-grande dame, Elizabeth Mapp.

In the second episode of Steve Pemberton's adaptations, the quaint town is thrilled by the arrival of a mysterious Indian gentleman who claims he is a "guru". He is immediately annexed by a ravenous Mapp (Miranda Richardson, outrageous teeth bared) who aims to run him while excluding her arch rival and nemesis, Lucia (Anna Chancellor, oh-so-chic).

Devotees of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia books will know that the guru didn't visit Tilling (he went to Riseholme) but no matter, it's another deliciously snooty hour.