This unexpectedly moving one-off comedy drama, co-written by The Royle Family's Caroline Aherne, stars an excellent Timothy Spall as Georgie Godwin, a Rochdale man so obese he hasn't left his house in 15 years. He lives on pizzas and mask-delivered oxygen, and needs his hardened calves to be massaged regularly by his carer, Janice (Frances Barber). Keeping him in sausage rolls is his sprightly "manager", Morris Morrissey (a splendid Tommy Ball), who charges tourists to gawp at Godwin's 50-stone frame. With Aherne's ribald northern humour (even the banner outside Godwin's neighbour's house, "Happy 30th Nana", is funny), the drama manages to be touching and fearlessly forthright as well as amusing.

Sometimes you just have to admit you were wrong. And, as Beautiful People limed to a disappointing conclusion, the bloom had well and truly left the cheeks of Jonathan Harvey's saga of a high camp Reading childhood.

So forget all the praise I'd heaped on it back in the beginning because all the decent jokes and imaginative set pieces got used up in the first two episodes. After that point, it went downhill quicker than Jonathan Ross's bargaining power at the BBC.

Even the arrival of Frances Barber as a madly bohemian teacher couldn't rescue Beautiful People's decline into limp-wristed cliché. Quite why Barber, an actress who could turn the weather forecast into a Greek tragedy, isn't a major star is just one of life's inexplicable injustices.

Jonathan Harvey's sitcom bows out with a guest appearance from Frances Barber as a new teacher at school, while young Simon and Kylie attempt to leave Reading behind to join the beautiful people in London. While each episode of this series has had bad patches, at its best it's been beautifully observed and frequently uproarious. Let's hope life in 1997 Reading isn't over quite yet, as a second series would be most welcome.

Edge Falls, your out of town retail Mecca, the comic brain child of Paul Barnhill and Neil Warhurst, returns. Mark Benton plays Mick, hapless head of security. Frances Barber plays the ingenious promotions manager Sonya, raising a giant pink inflatable love heart over the shops to bring in the pink pound. And all the staff has to be gay friendly too, but only to friendly gays (nothing ostentatious). We're gay for the day, says Sonya, before she spots what she thinks is a bit of hanky panky in the carpark. The spoof commercials are a treat, though.