Tom Hollander interview

Rev star Tom Hollander gives chapter and verse on boozing in church, Dylan Thomas, suicide and the 'big society'.

Two episodes in, Rev has settled down nicely. And settling things down seems to be the purpose of Tom Hollander's perplexed vicar, who operates on the almost revolutionary principle that the world would be a nicer place if people were nicer to each other. He's more "almost" than revolutionary, of course, because Rev is a comedy of English manners, with all the emotional repression that implies.

In Rev. (BBC Two), where Adam has been asked by two friends, Rob and Jeremy, to officiate at a "proper church wedding" in St Saviour. He can't, of course. It's against canon law, even if it's legal under proper law. His wife, Alex, thinks he should do it anyway. "As long as you don't get caught, it's just like parking on a double yellow," she says. Adam can't risk getting caught, because his church is threatened with closure as it is, for being insolvent and unpopular. To add to his woes, he's just come home without the baby, having left the pram in a shop, although he doesn't even realise this yet. I clocked it straight away, because I once left a baby in a shop. My vigilance now extends to babies from television programmes.

In Rev., Adam managed to recover his baby and offer his friends Rob and Jeremy a non-binding prayer service in church. The happy couple turned up from the register office in their wedding gear with a champagne-sipping, confetti-throwing congregation behind them and proceeded to make Reverend Smallbone's well-meant half-measure look like a very gay wedding indeed. The bishop, naturally, caught wind of it. Adam did his best to do the right thing, and he still got caught.

It was all played for laughs rather than tears - with Olivia Colman's drunk Alex a particular highlight - but at the end Adam got angry and married Rob and Jeremy for real, in the church, in secret. And I cried at that. Could secret gay weddings - and the pink pound - be the saviour of St Saviour?

Rev, series three, episode two, BBC Two, review

Rev.'s timely approach to gay weddings made me giggle with its gentle mockery, says Neil Midgley.

Does a sitcom actually need to make me laugh? That's the question I asked myself during the first episode of the third series of BBC Two's Rev. I certainly was glad to be given another opportunity to return to Saint Saviours and follow the exploits of the Reverend Adam Smallborne (Tom Hollander).

Once again Rev looks at the way that different people deal with faith by showing how many more people attend the local Mosque every week than come to Adam's church. James Wood's script is brilliant at combining this fairly deep subject matter with a light-handedness that makes it easy to like. Rev also excels due to its fantastically decent central characters Adam and Alex who are surrounded by a cavalcade of oddballs and mercenaries. Tom Hollander is brilliant in the lead role as he plays Adam as thoroughly down-to-Earth chap albeit one who constantly is worried about something or other. The brilliant Olivia Colman adds a bit of gravitas to her role of Alex whilst Simon McBurney and Miles Jupp continue to provide the laughs as Arch Deacon and Lay Preacher respectively.

As a fan of Getting On, I'm ecstatic that Scanlan and Pepperdine have joined the cast as a brilliant double act who may end up closing St. Saviour's. Even if the church does indeed close I hope that doesn't mean the end of what is brilliantly written and extremely well-acted series.

While it never makes me laugh out loud, Rev still provides plenty of good humour and that's sometimes all you need.

Traditional as its set-up may seem, in practice, Rev. manages to maintain a light level of satire alongside its gentle comedy. Tonight, with St Saviour's under financial scrutiny, Adam is forced to attend a course with the self-important Roland (Hugh Bonneville) about how to rescue his parish. As if he needed the extra drama, he also seems to have agreed to perform a gay marriage, more or less, for his friends Rob and Jeremy. The lightly delivered sermon being: you can't always do what people expect of you.

Radio Times review

An approach from Archdeacon Robert is like being addressed by an urbane python, but the black-gloved cleric has a sensitive side. Yes, he delivers another dire warning to vicar Adam Smallbone about St Saviour's lack of funds. (Hugh Bonneville is back briefly as Roland Wise, the Dale Carnegie-like motivational cleric.) But when rumour spreads that Adam has conducted a gay wedding, maybe the Archdeacon (Simon McBurney) will exercise a little understanding.

With same-sex weddings now legal it's a timely story handled with humour (of course), compassion and without preachiness. Adam (Tom Hollander) is torn when two friends want a [forbidden] church ceremony. He agrees to say prayers for their union as long as there are no rings, confetti or any walking down the aisle...

There's a ripped-from-the-headlines quality about tonight's episode. Same-sex marriages became legal in England and Wales on Saturday, but the Church of England has stipulated that it won't be carrying them out, although it will stretch to prayers for newlywed couples.

And tonight, we see the dilemma that could typically pose for vicars when two gay friends of Adam's announce that they're getting married and want him to do the honours ("No confetti!"). St Saviours has never seen such a turnout, but Archdeacon Robert (the fabulous Simon McBurney) doesn't reckon this is any cause to celebrate. He does, however, have some good advice for Adam who wants to take his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) on a mini-break. He says, mystifyingly: "You can always tell a good pub hotel by whether the bedrooms have got logs in them."

And you can always tell a good non-wedding by the hangovers the next day. A drunken Alex, who is working her way through the Smallbones' drinks cabinet, is a real highlight.

And so is Hugh Bonneville, who pops in again as Roland, the media-friendly cleric who's now running training courses to save churches all over the world.

The wonderful thing about Rev. (BBC Two, Monday) is that it is meant to be funny and it is genuinely hilarious. Tom Hollander and Olivia Colman play the leads but it is more an ensemble comedy with top performances, too, from Simon McBurney as the Archdeacon, Miles Jupp as Nigel and Steve Evets as Colin.

In fact dear Colin provides all the jaw-dropping, non-PC moments; not least for his fundraising efforts for St Saviour's which amounted to supplying drugs to the estate. He knows his market.

It was especially touching to see him present Adam (the Rev), with some oversize track pants from Sports Direct for his new baby as part of his campaign to be "godfather". Who knows what that term means to him?

Rev also pushes the boundaries or let's say, gives them a nudge. Last week, Adam bumped into Yousef, the local Iman, who had a sense of humour, "within limits". I could not understand why Adam did not jump at the chance of attending one of the Iman's "Jihadi barbecues". The mind boggles.

The best line, however, came from the archdeacon who said he was off to hear "Rageh Omaar giving a talk on Djibouti pirates". I was gutted to have missed that one. If only the Church of England could harness the power of Rev., it would have no trouble filling the pews.

"I don't want a christening yet. I've already lost you to him." Thus Olivia Colman, with just that phrase, sets the entire tone for Rev, as she has quietly done for each of the past two series. By turns giggly, mournful, drunk, charming, ballsily defiant and utterly conflicted, she encapsulates pretty much this secular nation's attitude to 21st-century Christianity, which could be summed up in the title of a fine Douglas Adams novel (writing not about God but Earth itself): Mostly Harmless.

A triumphant return but, for a comedy, it's pretty strong gravy when you think about it, as you should. The fact that God is man's finest confection detracts not one whit from "his" essential confected goodness, and the palaces of myth serve, by and large, to do great good. Except when they get in the way of real life, or bore, or nag: and that's why Colman does such a tremendous job, refracting our every niggle with organised religion through the simple premise of being married to, and more pertinently in love with, a rev. So we share her increasing frustration at the fact that hubby, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander), has to open his door not just to waifs and strays but to borderline psychopaths: troubling enough when they were just the two, but the arrival of baby Katie is a delight that is slowly, delightfully, doing their nuts in.

It is also, I should have mentioned this, extremely funny. I don't think that Hollander or his co-writer James Wood have put much more than a tootsie wrong since the first series, but their writing in this latest outing becomes ever more deft, daring, even confrontational. The scene in which Mick, the splendidly grubby dreadlocked Jimmy Akingbola (carrying the most foetidly evil one-armed doll) offers to babysit, with the well-intentioned cackle: "You take your lady out for a nice night an' when you comes back, ta-da! She still alive!" mesmerised: and also spoke of poverty, race relations, child abuse and 10 other things which don't get a better outing in an entire hour of the increasing fractious Question Time. Adam/Tom's facial reaction to this charming offer was a brief masterclass in English politesse. And at his heart is not so much a crisis of faith but the full and faithful knowledge that God does not exist other than to provide the wages.

As far away from Derek Nimmo in All Gas and Gaiters, in generational terms, as it's possible to get, and hyperspace-removed from the Vicar of Dibley, as in it's funny: not only but very. And so wise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into what is, after all, a half-hour of light entertainment on a Monday night, but when I saw Adam/Tom - I cherish the believability of the character so much, they're interchangeable - standing in some yakhole of a playground pulling on an e-cigarette, he simply felt like every small man mulling over big thoughts, as opposed to every big man thinking small thoughts, ever. I don't have too much choice in the matter, but I know which one I'd rather be.