The traditional redemptive sugar substitute is provided by the "heart-warming" (your critical alarm bells should now be ringing) tale of a Birkenhead family holidaying in Lapland. Sue Johnston and Julie Graham star, and Zawe Ashton - so wonderful as Vod in Channel 4's student comedy drama Fresh Meat - plays the tour rep known as "Jingle Jill".

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.

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The final episode of this by-the-numbers comedy-drama set in a village in the north of England which fears outsiders and prides itself on the quality of its rock. As in Blackpool rock. Jason and Emily put the wedding back on and Max continues his plans for the town's redevelopment. It's not groundbreaking, but Sue Johnston is as reliable as ever, and at least it doesn't have a laughter track.

I recently wrote to television to ask it, in polite yet vigorous terms, to cease making whimsical comedy-dramas set in idealised northern towns which promulgate the tired view that Britain is populated entirely by loveable eccentrics and pantomime villains. Did it listen? Did it 'eck as like.

Or perhaps Sugartown was already in the can by the time my urgent missive arrived, and that seeing as the BBC don't appear to have much faith in it - shunting it out almost apologetically at the unedifying slot of 10:25pm on a Sunday - this will be the last programme of its type we shall ever see, paving way for a new golden dawn where populist drama isn't a euphemism for "bland, cosy, unambitious nothingness starring a man in a bobble hat".

One can but hopelessly dream.

Set in a fictional seaside town financially supported by the local rock factory (hence the title), and populated by the likes of Sue Johnston doing her daffy yet dependable older woman act, it is pitched somewhere between Victoria Wood and an Ealing comedy, but without the wit or spark of either.

You know how it goes: unscrupulous entrepreneur threatens to close the factory, forcing the plucky locals to fight back in a variety of unamusing ways. That their principle method of rebellion is the feel-good factor of dance should also come as no surprise to you.

What may startle you slightly, however, is the villain's stewardship of a mini Playboy club, which is of course precisely the sort of establishment you'd find in a nowhere town where nearly every resident is an OAP. Yes, I know it's not a Ken Loach film, but you can only suspend your disbelief so much.

Featuring a mayor who arrives to work on a bicycle wearing full ceremonial attire - presumably as a concession to those who wish to believe that Trumpton was a documentary - and a character seemingly intended to illustrate the lighter side of bipolar disorder, Sugartown succeeds neither as comedy nor drama.

Pastel-coloured in sugary shades of CBBC, it should be studiously avoided if you're lactose intolerant or simply intolerant of vacuous entertainment.

I recently wrote to television to ask it, in polite yet vigorous terms, to cease making whimsical comedy-dramas set in idealised northern towns which promulgate the tired view that Britain is populated entirely by loveable eccentrics and pantomime villains. Did it listen? Did it 'eck as like.

Or perhaps Sugartown was already in the can by the time my urgent missive arrived, and that seeing as the BBC don't appear to have much faith in it - shunting it out almost apologetically at the unedifying slot of 10:25pm on a Sunday - this will be the last programme of its type we shall ever see, paving way for a new golden dawn where populist drama isn't a euphemism for "bland, cosy, unambitious nothingness starring a man in a
bobble hat".

One can but hopelessly dream.

Set in a fictional seaside town financially supported by the local rock factory (hence the title), and populated by the likes of Sue Johnston doing her daffy yet dependable older woman act, it is pitched somewhere between Victoria Wood and an Ealing comedy, but without the wit or spark of either.

You know how it goes: unscrupulous entrepreneur threatens to close the factory, forcing the plucky locals to fight back in a variety of unamusing ways. That their principle method of rebellion is the feel-good factor of dance should also come as no surprise to you.

What may startle you slightly, however, is the villain's stewardship of a mini Playboy club, which is of course precisely the sort of establishment you'd find in a nowhere town where nearly every resident is an OAP. Yes, I know it's not a Ken Loach film, but you can only suspend your disbelief so much.

Featuring a mayor who arrives to work on a bicycle wearing full ceremonial attire - presumably as a concession to those who wish to believe that Trumpton was a documentary - and a character seemingly intended to illustrate the lighter side of bipolar disorder, Sugartown succeeds neither as comedy nor drama.

Pastel-coloured in sugary shades of CBBC, it should be studiously avoided if you're lactose intolerant or simply intolerant of vacuous entertainment.

Sugartown has a lot of very bad dancing

This is just a wild guess but when actress Sue Johnston looks back on a career that has taken in the glory years of Brookside and The Royle Family, dressing up as a sherbet dab and dancing like a loon to Starship's We Built This City, will not figure among the highlights.
And that was one of the better bits of Sugartown (BBC1).

A lumpy comedy drama set in an ailing seaside town up north, Sugartown has Miranda's Tom Ellis as the bad brother (he's been down south and is thus rich) returning to steal the local seaside rock factory from the good brother (poor, obviously).

In order to stop this happening, good brother's salt-of-the-earth/dippy mates are going to do a lot of very bad dancing. Because, apparently, 'Sugartown used to be the centre of dance'. And there was me, thinking that was St Petersburg.