Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman interview

As Ladies of Letters returns on ITV3, Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman explain how TV fails older viewers.

"This man seems to have spent his entire career dressed in women's clothing," declares Eddie Izzard at the start of this enlightening biography of Stanley Baxter. That's rich coming from a man not averse to a full-on flirtation with frockery himself, but it is said with nothing but admiration. In fact the warmth with which Stanley Baxter is described by the likes of Maureen Lipman, Barry Cryer, Billy Connolly and Julia McKenzie would keep the 82-year-old comic actor comfortable for years if it was converted into central heating. What they all recognise is that beneath the multiplicity of funny faces, extraordinary voices and relentless costume changes, Baxter has never shied away from humour that requires a bit of intelligence and cultural awareness from his audience.

Even when I was growing up in the 1970s, Stanley Baxter seemed to be slowing down his comedic output, with his TV appearances to Christmas specials. That single show every year was so finely crafted, though, that it was an inevitable festive highlight. That Baxter is still producing great work (though mainly on radio these days) is a blessing, and this exploration of his life's work, presented by Eddie Izzard and with contributions from Julia McKenzie, Maureen Lipman, Denise Coffey and many others, promises to be rather special.

Thoughtful, inventive comedy by Adam Rosenthal and Viv Ambrose. Newfangle (Russell Tovey) is one of a tribe of humans at an early, pre-verbal stage of development. Picked on by the alpha male (Hugh Bonneville), hopelessly in love, looked down on by his mother (Maureen Lipman) who prefers his brother (Gabriel Vick), Newfangle is a thinker and one day, wishing to express his thoughts out loud, he invents language. Then people start using it for things he didn't intend. Soon prehistory turns out to quite a lot like life anywhere, anytime. But funnier.

Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman's gloriously comic creations Vera and Irene return, exchanging missives and misunderstandings that produce some glorious comedy. Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales return to the roles - ITV3's versions in the form of Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman were fun, but pale shadows of the original.

The battling ladies have made a triumphant transfer from radio to TV thanks to Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid. It may be that life is going pear-shaped, but indomitable is the word for these two. This final outing isn't the strongest but it does reach a stylish and apt conclusion.

We don't tend to pick up programmes mid-run, but we feel sorry for Ladies Of Letters. Stuck out in the Arctic of ITV3, adapted from Radio 4, the signs are not good. Not good at all. But in spite of that, it's a lovely show. Mainly down to old pros Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman, who act the socks off the material, stringing every comic line out to just the right extent. Tonight contains the usual blend of accusations, animosity and acrimony. They're both in prison, Irene scrawling on toilet roll and Vera dictating to cellmate Beefy. At least until Irene signs off: 'I believe Vera espouses racialist views'. You might as well watch it now. It'll never get another series.

Over on MasterChef, one of their recurrent themes is how you shouldn't chuck too many different flavours on the plate. So in TV terms, you could say that Ladies Of Letters is a masterclass in how to deliver the maximum amount of enjoyment from the simplest ingredients.

Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid are consistently brilliant as waspish widows Vera and Irene, and not a single word or gesture goes to waste.

Tonight when Vera discovers that her daughter Karen is pregnant, her reaction is sublime: "It's a fine line between joyful effervescence and murderous rage," she trills happily to her pen-pal.

The subject matter - like Vera's son who is obviously gay to everyone but his mother - might be slightly predictable, but the two leads can wring more comedy out of a single furious glance than many sitcoms manage in an entire episode. First class.

Ladies of Letters, the second part of whose 10-part adaptation from the radio show of the same name was shown last night, starred Anne Reid and Maureen Lipman as the letter-writing widows who keep their spirits up with sherry, shared recipes and long-distance one-upmanship. As with the radio version, the material is slightly thin, but you could watch (or in Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge's case, listen to) the actors involved all day. Clever, that.

Based on a book and successful radio series, Ladies Of Letters consists of an exchange of letters between two elderly widows, the joke (such as it is) depending on what is never quite stated in their peerlessly vacuous correspondence. Unfortunately, while doing an epistolary narrative such as this on radio is like falling off a log, doing it on television - with Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid taking the part of Irene and Vera - is an absolute nightmare.

For one thing, you have to decide what your correspondents are going to do while they're 'reading' their letters. Do they look at a writing pad or at the camera, and if it's the latter, then what part are we supposed to be playing in the thing? What on radio is a dialogue by other means becomes a pair of monologues flying in clumsy formation. What's more, nervous that comedy won't emerge from between the lines naturally, the producers have contrived a kind of forceps delivery. The line "I tried your taramasalata dip on the vicar's wife and she said she'd never tasted anything like it" provokes a monochrome flashback of a woman throwing up into her handkerchief. Or comedy sound effects are added to the memory of a mishap with a garage door. Or the performers are encouraged to overact wildly in an attempt to shock the thing into life. "Gerald always had a sweet tooth," wrote Vera of her late husband, and then, quite inexplicably, flung a pat of cake mix at his photograph. They tried everything, but it was dead on arrival.