Video: British Comedy Awards interviews

Sara Shulman interviews Johnny Vegas, Steve Coogan, Jack Whitehall, Vicki Pepperdine, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Rosenthal and Ryan Sampson at The British Comedy Awards.

Writers' Guild Awards 2013 shortlists

Nominations for Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine, Joanna Scanlan, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Stefan Golaszewski, Susan Calman, Sanjeev Kohli, Donald McLeary, David Sedaris, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram.

Despite the impeccable credentials of everyone involved (Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine), Up The Women just doesn't fly. For a start, there's no real point; any political edge is sidestepped or dampened by the air of farce. And the humour itself is limited to double entendre, sight gags and broad physical comedy. Why couldn't the BBC have just commissioned a full series of Hynes and Julia Davis's scabrous Lizzie and Sarah instead?

How many Edwardians does it take to change a light bulb? About eight if Up the Women is anything to go by, though as one of them said: "It's hard to see how this would replace the candle."

Jessica Hynes wrote in this newspaper last week that her three-part sitcom about a group of failed suffragettes was originally intended as a film. It says nothing too complimentary about our priorities that the project ended up as a BBC4 micro-budget three-parter, shot in front of a studio audience in a two-room set.

As it was, the traces of its film script origins were detectable in Hynes's performance as the clever but timid Margaret. She proposed that the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle revitalise itself as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage. Hynes appeared to be acting in the uplifting, thoughtful movie that you would never have quite got round to seeing at your local arthouse cinema. Oddly, though, she seemed to be surrounded by performances, from Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine et al, that were sketch-show broad.

The script, too, careered between these two registers. Still, the brilliant Pepperdine had some funny false teeth and mugged her way through a quite silly knob gag. That just about got my floating vote.

Up the Women has a great premise: a ladies' craft circle is politicised by Margaret (Jessica Hynes) into forming a group to "politely request women's suffrage". It also has a great cast, including Rebecca Front as a dissenting snob ("Does your husband know you were cavorting with skirted anarchists?") and Vicki Pepperdine as a simple-minded "old maid". All it lacked was a great first episode. There were some overdone historical gags (one about a lightbulb being a "ridiculous fad" seemed to last for several years), with suffragettes described as "mannish, flat-fronted, bottom-heavy spinsters".

Up the Women seemed undecided whether to aim for a suffrage-themed Dad's Army vibe, or Blackadder-style absurdist drollery, falling nervously in between. Saying that, first episodes are notoriously tricky, and there was more than enough to merit another peek. My favourite bit was Margaret's earnest, quavering, suffragette singsong that attempted to be rousing but ending up sounding as if somebody from Songs of Praise was being gently lowered into a well.

So where would Jessica Hynes go after her brilliant turn as the spectacularly ghastly PR Siobhan in Twenty Twelve?

The answer, rather surprisingly, is back in time, donning the high collars and sturdy skirts of suburban wife Margaret - a pillar of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle - in Up The Women (BBC4).

Except that Margaret has seen the light, a brush with suffragettes in London has opened her eyes to the Votes For Women cause. Now Margaret is determined to spread the word to her fellow stitching ladies.

However, in her way stands the indomitable Helen, a woman who likes the world just the way it is - because she's in charge - and who squashes the intellectually frustrated Margaret flat, telling her: 'I know it's hard for you to accept that you've read all those books for nothing.'

This could all come across as a quaint timepiece but Hynes, who writes as well as stars, cleverly draws parallels between life now and life a century ago, without hammering the point home.

Women still have a hard time being valued on intellect alone, just as they did in Edwardian times. Margaret is a woman for all ages.

Buoyed by some fine performances - Hynes and Rebecca Front locked in psychological battle as Margaret and Helen, Vicki Pepperdine brilliant (as ever) as a cake-baking frump, Judy Parfitt squeezing every last drop of libido out of a lusty granny - Up The Women is a comedy that sneaks up on you, ambushing with sly wit rather than attacking with laugh-out-loud gags.

It's not the finished article and this is just a tester three-part run.

But I'd vote for any comedy that has Margaret explaining why she hasn't told her husband about her new-found militancy thus: 'He's been very melancholic since Nietzsche's death - I thought it might tip him over the edge.' Beyond good and evil, rock on.

Rebecca Front stars in Up the Women, written by Jessica Hynes, who co-penned the rather brilliant Spaced (1999-2001) but who, strangely, has never received the same acclaim as her co-writer Simon Pegg.

Up the Women is traditional in its format - it's set mostly in one room, in this instance a village hall where the Bunbury Intricate Crafts Circle meet. It's 1910, and one of BICC's members, Margaret (Hynes) has been seduced by Suffragettism while on a day trip to London. The group's self-appointed bossy-boots leader Helen (Front), meanwhile, is having none of it when Margaret meekly suggests the group might support women's emancipation - "Women should not have the vote. We are simple, emotional creatures."

Margaret is a brainy woman who has long since accepted that women must always defer to men, even those markedly less intelligent, and a good running gag involved her explaining electricity to the overbearing caretaker (Adrian Scarborough), who was struggling to fit a new-fangled lightbulb.

The characters - particularly Vicki Pepperdine's toothy spinster - are drawn in broad strokes, and occasionally the humour (peonies being misheard for penis, for instance) is groaningly obvious. But there are some neat lines too, and superb acting from a fantastic cast who look like they're enjoying themselves, including Judy Parfitt doing a nice turn as Helen's decidedly naughty mother, Myrtle, sexually liberated long before the term was invented by the Pankhursts' spiritual daughters. Worth staying with.

Jessica Hynes moves as far as she can from her buzzword-spewing PR wonk in Twenty Twelve with a self-penned sitcom set in a church hall in Banbury in 1910. Hynes is Margaret, a mouse about to roar: she wants the other women in the local craft circle to put down their tapestries and agitate for women's suffrage.

It's a static, traditional affair. In episode one at least, we never leave the hall and its adjoining kitchen, and despite an army of additional gag-writers on the credits, you're more likely to smile creakily than laugh. But, gently, the foundations of something good are in place.

Rebecca Front and Vicki Pepperdine are terrific as a frosty antagonist and buck-toothed naïf respectively, Hynes is great as ever, and the central point - that the silly sexism of the time is still with us - lends it some edge.

Jessica Hynes's first full-series sitcom since Spaced could hardly be more different: old-fashioned, a little stagey and reminiscent of Dad's Army with its band of carefully characterised misfits playing a bit part in serious events of global significance.

Hynes is Margaret, leading a superb cast including Rebecca Front (whose embittered luddite conservative is a highlight), Vicki Pepperdine and Judy Parfitt as the ladies of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle. The hot debate of the day (that day being in 1910) rapidly moves from tiffin provisions to whether or not to take up the suffragette cause after Margaret returns from London bursting with politely revolutionary zeal.

The performances are game (especially from Pepperdine, shelving any vanity rather magnificently), but the satire nibbles rather than bites; it's resolutely warm, gentle stuff, lacking a little polish and a big comic set-piece. Even so, it's a concept rich with potential and Hynes has more than earned our indulgence with her performance in Twenty Twelve.