Patrick Barlow and Jim Broadbent were the original National Theatre of Brent, with an approach to the great themes of drama somewhat akin to that of the painter LS Lowry's to the industrial north: apparently naive but actually perceptive. Barlow and Broadbent, on their own, tackling everything from the nativity to Shakespeare, were very funny. This is Barlow's take on the story of St Joan, maiden warrior and martyr, played here by Dawn French. Broadbent appears in the unexpectedly large cast list which includes Cheryl Campbell and John Ramm, with Anne Reid and Maggie Steed as Joan's guardian angels.

Tomorrow, Today! is set in a BBC recording studio in 1962, where a cluster of disappointed hacks labour through a terrible sci-fi script and try not to kill each other in the process.

Who cares? It's so silly I doubt anyone's listening anyway, sulked Sylvia (played by Cheryl Campbell), which were my thoughts exactly.

Everyone, from the writer Christopher William Hill down, seems to have had a whale of a time making this comedy set in the past but concerning a radio soap that takes place in 2008.

And you can see why. Two worlds are your oyster, and events in both of them are known. In 1962 you have all the events going on that happened then - reds under the bed, mainly - while the 2008 stuff that the characters in the soap imagine would be commonplace now (still with me?) provokes the usual knowing laughter that comes from knowing how wrong they got it.

Toss in rampant paranoia along the lines of 1984 (the book, not the year), a death or two and a first-rate cast (Peter Bowles, Cheryl Campbell and John Fortune) and you have something that should come to boil nicely over the next six weeks.