Writing Roger & Val: Episode Zero and The Mice

Roger and Val Have Just Got In returned to our screens on Wednesday 8th February. Beth Kilcoyne co-wrote the show with her sister Emma, and stopped by to talk to us series two.

One Foot In The Grave had a suppressed secret, mentioned only once, that the Meldrews had a child who had died. There is less reticence in Roger & Val Have Just Got In - the sitcom's second series began with a resume which included Roger's tragic observation that he had been a father for "five and a half weeks."

The bereavement is not something they like to discuss much but it does answer the question of why, like so many sitcom couples, they are childless and... we can see with its protagonists obsession with trivia as a form of displacement. It certainly, I felt, informed last night's references to the 'bleakness' of their home, a bleakness that could be offset only by packing away their baggage (Roger & Val had just returned from a wedding) and turning off the overhead lights in favour of kinder lighting.

Emma and Beth Kilcoyne's writing contains wonderful lines that captures the pair's more or less comfortable isolation. Val, looking at The Observer, complained that it was like "15 other people coming into the house all jabbering for my attention." They are all delivered perfectly. Not many people other than Alfred Molina could say, "Rolf Harris doing what he does very well" without sounding idiotic. He is superb, but Dawn French's is the riskier performance. When he gently mocks her hopes of becoming a Deputy Headmistress by citing Bob Marley's I Shot The Sheriff (but I did not shoot the Deputy) she responds by shouting Come On Eileen so aggressively it takes a second to realise she is singing. My only criticism concerns the box-on-Val's-head gags that play to the gallery. There is no gallery. This is BBC Two.

The second series of this bleak comedy has been a long time coming, as if the BBC were as ambivalent as audiences and critics after its August 2010 debut. However, this warm and subtly funny two-hander has much to recommend it. Played out in real time, it follows the titular married couple as they return home and discuss their day, and its cleverness is how their discourse about minutiae cannily shows us their true feelings. It's gently revelatory, with no bursting into tears or laying down the law, which is refreshing in itself. Alfred Molina and Dawn French are faultless as neurotic botanist Roger and fretful teacher Val, with French dialling down her comedy persona to render her a believeable suburban matron. Long-marrieds will relate ruefully to their endless gentle bickering - tonight, upon returning home from a family wedding, Val harps on about Roger's ill-timed use of a hotel bathroom that prevented her enjoying the complimentary bath oils. If at times Emma and Beth Kilcoyne's script veers towards insipidness, the piece is unique and well-acted enough to get away with it. Tonight's first of eight episodes sees Roger and Val's comfortable universe disrupted by the arrival of an important letter.

Radio Times review

Half an hour in real time, in the house of a middle-aged couple (Alfred Molina and Dawn French) who have Just Got In from work. No scenes outside. No other characters. Few traditional "jokes". Is that the recipe for the year's best sitcom? Yes, because comedy is character and these characters were exquisite.

With writers Emma and Beth Kilcoyne having nailed the peculiar rhythms and catchphrases of long-term cohabitants, almost everything this melancholy but sweetly supportive pair said could raise a low-key, warm titter.

But the series wasn't content with being a perfectly observed micro-comedy about marriage. As that melancholy took over, and Val and Roger's charming vulnerability assumed a darker, more dramatic hue, we learnt that they were bound together not just by domestic convenience, but by grief. The searingly sad fourth episode, where the nature of that loss was revealed, was the best half-hour of telly of 2010 in any genre.

Roger and Val: Beyond the Curtain Hooks

"It can't just be about curtain hooks. What do they slam the door against and what's already in the house that they can't escape?" This was the question posed to [co-writer] Emma and me in the first meeting with our then-potential script editor, Hugo Blick - the genius behind such works as Marion & Geoff, Up In Town and Sensitive Skin.

Roger and Val Have Just Got In is set in real time, covering the half hour after a comfortably off, middle aged couple have returned home from work. Which has to be the least enticing sitcom premise ever, so maximum respect to whoever pitched that at the BBC Comedy Department.

But dismiss the show at your peril, as it stars Alfred Molina and Dawn French in the title roles, performing exquisitely observed and intricately constructed scripts by Emma and Beth Kilcoyne.

Fish fingers in the wrong fridge, a lost receipt for a vacuum cleaner and badly hanging curtains have so far provided Roger and Val with cause for conflict, reconciliation and yet more conflict.

It's engaging, rather than enthralling, provoking smiles of recognition rather than howls of amusement.

Roger and Val have just been broadcast

Exactly as I predicted, the day your show goes out for the first time feels like both a wedding and a court appearance.

I suppose Roger & Val Have Just Got In (Friday, BBC Two) qualifies as a sitcom, but somehow this does it a disservice. Alfred Molina and Dawn French play a married couple who spend their time chatting in an apparently inconsequential way. In the first episode, they also went through their drawers looking for a guarantee for their vacuum cleaner.

Beth Kilcoyne and Emma Kilcoyne's script was beautifully observed - and superbly performed by Molina and French. This too had a washed-out sort of look. It was only slowly that Roger and Val's colour, and their idiosyncrasies, came to the surface. The show wasn't roaringly funny, but then it doesn't set out to be. Instead it's charming, intriguing and full of that rarest of qualities, emotional truth.

This is a strange new comedy series. It depicts a middle-aged couple during the half-hour after they get in from work. Dawn French plays Val, a waddling teacher of "food technology" whose level of expertise is not so much Auguste Escoffier as King Alfred. Her devoted, slightly simple botanist husband Roger is played by Alfred Molina - more often seen in Hollywood blockbusters than chamber comedy these days - who manfully wrestles with a succession of trite homilies and telegraphed gags in his role.

Shot vérité style and in real time, drained of colour and canned laughter, the programme attempts to underpin its gentle observational humour with the pathos of childless marriage, but only occasionally succeeds. Too often the dialogue, in its desire to appear simultaneously portentous and amusing, instead falls in the gap between funny and moving.

Written by twin sisters Emma and Beth Kilcoyne, Roger and Val... in some ways exemplifies the great BBC quandary: how do you remind the public that their £145.50 a year is not being entirely wasted on executives, while also making them laugh and all the while continuing to employ Dawn French? Head of Comedy Mark Freeland has conceded that "not everyone will get it". I fear that unless you've sweated out long nights hoping that Marion and Geoff would breed with The Vicar of Dibley, you'll fall into the "not everyone" camp.

Beth Kilcoyne: Roger and Val Have Just Got In

Nearly three years ago a card dropped through my door and when I had read it I started running round my house, screaming. This is because the card was from Dawn French, who had seen a comedy written by me and my sister Emma and it invited us to go to a meeting with her.