Richard Boston

Carla Lane's The Last Song (BBC2) is a bitter-sweet confection reporting wryly from no-man's-land in the battle of the sexes. It's a sort of marital 'Yes, Minister' in which 50-year-old Leo is the punch-bag for the wife he is leaving and the girl half his age he has shacked up with. So far in the series the women have been shown as terrifyingly predatory and the men as terribly wet. What sustains it is the performance of Geoffrey Palmer. His rumpled, lugubrious countenance is wonderfully expressive, and he speaks his lines with such conviction that it is only when the other actors are hamming it up that one realises how weak much of the dialogue is.