Cuckoo at the Royal Court Theatre review

Baffling. That's the only word to describe Michael Wynne's play, an amusing but aimless Liverpudlian sitcom featuring three generations of women.

Not much happens in Being Eileen, but being a downbeat British situation comedy, it doesn't matter. The point is the interplay of authentic characters in banal situations. Under the pen of Michael Wynne, the results are funny and touching.

It helps that the recently widowed Eileen is played by Sue Johnston, the nation's favourite matriarch. She is a genius at marrying tenderness and a light touch, from The Royle Family to Waking the Dead. There is possibly too much in Eileen borrowed from Barbara Royle, but we can stand to watch it over and over: if you remember the brilliance of her doing the housework to Lou Bega, then it's fine to watch a reprise here to Motörhead. This is classic British comedy territory, finding a deep well of humour in sadness and it was very enjoyable.

Wynne first wrote about these Birkenhead people in 2011's one-off comedy drama Lapland. Eileen has two married children, and both have two young kids of their own. The family units crackle with banter: the trick is to stop children sounding like wisecracking adults, as they did in Diff'rent Strokes, and instead make them sparky foils for the comedic grown-ups.

There are glorious moments. A mad, sad woman in a graveyard sings happy birthday to her dead husband while two of Eileen's grandchildren spontaneously join in, to the horror of their mother. A desperately lonely meals-for-one chap gives a speech in a supermarket about how we are deserted in our old age, creating a hum of disquiet in the cold meats area.

It's not as depressing a situation as Steptoe or Porridge nor are the characters as mired in working class immobility as the Trotters or the Royles, but it's of the same lineage. Being Eileen deserved far better than a miserable slot after the 10pm news, particularly when we were offered only a repeat of Outnumbered at 9pm. Most peculiar mama, as they say on Merseyside.

Sue Johnston stars as Eileen, the widowed matriarch of a riotous Birkenhead family in Michael Wynne's new six-part comedy drama. We first encountered the Lewises in Lapland, a 75-minute Christmas special which was screened in 2011, when the newly fatherless clan travelled to the Arctic Circle and Eileen learned to live life to the full. But back home, things aren't so rosy and now Eileen has vanished and her daughter, Paula (Elizabeth Berrington), fearing the worst, organises a family search party.

In Lapland - chillingly described as "heartwarming" in the Radio Times - it was the Northern Lights that provided the cure-all for family dysfunction, uniting a bickering Birkenhead family in innocent wonder at the end of a trip to visit Santa. Michael Wynne's drama had been so sour and bad-tempered up to this point, though, that the sudden swerve into bonhomie felt deeply unconvincing. One rapprochement - between a beleaguered husband and his endlessly whining wife - came about because he finally lost his patience and snapped, "Will you shut your fat gob for once!" a remark that I'm sure spoke for many viewers but seemed implausible as a catalyst for festive peace. There were some good lines, but I still came out thinking Mandy's early grumble had been a hazardous hostage to fortune: "Christmas," she said winningly, "is all about sitting on a sofa watching shite and eating crap."

Olivier Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne turns his hand to TV comedy tonight, with this one-off special about a close-knit Birkenhead family who decide to pull out the stops and go to Lapland for Christmas. It stars the excellent Sue Johnston - best known as Barbara Royle from The Royle Family - as the family's benevolent matriarch, Eileen; with support from a strong ensemble cast, including Elizabeth Berrington (Waterloo Road) as her overstressed daughter Paula and Stephen Graham (This Is England) as her long-suffering son Pete. Being a British comedy, it doesn't take long for the infighting to start, and the film contains a handful of smartly observed scenes that will be familiar to many viewers - from the grandmother being used as a permanently on-call nanny by her own children, to the simmering family grievances vented after a few glasses of sherry, to the difficulty of keeping older siblings from spoiling the magic of Father Christmas for their younger brothers and sisters. At points, this takes the programme more into the realm of edgy, Shameless-style drama than gentle festive comedy; but Wynne manages to sugar the pill with a good deal of warm Northern humour.