This promising all-star comedy drama stars Mathew Baynton, one of the Horrible Histories ensemble, as Jamie, a diffident bank manager who is falsely arrested for cyberterrorism but for whom a still grimmer fate lies in wait, along with the rest of humanity: a comet is on an unavoidable collision course with Earth, due to crash in 34 days. Appropriately, the cast is like a sea of past sitcoms flashing before your eyes - Megan Mullally from Will & Grace, Jenna Fischer, Rob Lowe and Pauline Quirke as Jamie's mum.

Pauline Quirke: "I used to be sick with nerves"

"I used to be sick, physically sick, for Birds, all those years. 101 episodes, throwing up in the toilet."

The end of the world proves very funny

Pauline Quirke has some of the best lines in the comedy which also cleverly interweaves stories from across the world.

Pauline Quirke on her new comedy co-star Rob Lowe

Birds Of A Feather actress Pauline Quirke admits she was in heaven working alongside Hollywood star Rob Lowe in their new Sky1 comedy drama You, Me and The Apocalypse.

An episode of the sitcom that's not so much been revived as zombified, but that has nevertheless proved a ratings winner. Dorien debates Dostoevsky with her book group, while Tracey warns her sons not to get fingered by the filth. As the cast stiffly shout a script that feels as if flair and surprises have been excised by censors, those stories vaguely collide. Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph, who have the knack of saying their lines as if they have read and understood them in advance, spark the odd glimmer.

BOAF: Ageing? There'll be no botox or surgery for us

Birds Of A Feather is back for more in 2015, so Love Sunday magazine caught up with straight-talking Essex girls Lesley Joseph, Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke...

Radio Times review

After years of Towie brashness, the bawdy Essex humour of Birds of a Feather seems cosy by comparison. Bad puns come with the regularity of a metronome, while the plot signposting is so big it could take your eye out. That said, the on-screen relationships between Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson and Lesley Joseph are as comfortable as a pair of fluffy slippers.

In the first episode of this new series, Dorien is treating Sharon and Tracey to a holiday in the Canary Islands. But before the flight has even taken off, Dorien is in the onboard loo waiting to join the "50ft High Club". The jokes are pretty down to earth, too - assume the brace position throughout.

It was a little discombobulating to see Birds Of A Feather back on our screens after 15 years, albeit transposed from the BBC to ITV. Essex sisters Sharon (Pauline Quirke) and Tracey (Linda Robson) were initially estranged, while maneater Dorien (Lesley Joseph) had hit the big time by writing a 50 Shades-style bonkbuster under the nom de plume "Foxy Cohen". After a series of unfortunate events, they were all reunited under the same roof by the end of the first episode, a housing situation complicated by Sharon's teenage son Travis (played, rather confusingly, by Pauline Quirke's real-life offspring Charlie Quirke) and the late arrival of another sibling, Garth (former Busted heartthrob Matt Willis), with his new Aussie partner and a kid in tow.

Stuffing all these bodies into one Chigwell house is a smart sitcom move, although past masters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran didn't need proximity and antagonism to craft gags, firing them out willy-nilly from the off. With pointed jabs at Cameron and Osborne, it made me wonder: did the show used to be so politically minded? In performance terms, Robson, Quirke and Joseph had the benefit of a recent theatre tour warm-up, so it seemed very much like busybody-ness as usual. As yet, there have been no references to The Only Way Is Essex, but surely it's only a matter of time.

Fans surprised as return turns out not to be terrible

Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph all returned for tonight's inaugural episode, titled Gimme Shelter, with Matt Willis in the role of Garth - and feedback was positive.

Birds Of A Feather (ITV), which began in 1989, has been away from our screens for 15 years. The trio of smashing actresses who carry the show - Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph - must have been preserved in aspic, because none of them looks any older than they did in the Nineties.

The big change here is that Birds was always a BBC comedy. After the sitcom's West End stage success, writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran approached the corporation and were told, implausibly, that Auntie's policy is never to do revivals.

That makes little sense, when you consider that the BBC's most popular drama, Doctor Who, lay dormant for more than a decade before being revived.

Anyway, it's the Beeb's loss, because Birds was as funny and edgy as ever. Sex-mad Dorian had reinvented herself as an erotic author called Foxey Cohen, Tracy was a single mum again and Sharon was still boiling with working-class indignation.

'Mr Cameron says we're all in this together,' she grumbled, 'so how come I never bump into him down by the bins?'