Jessica Hynes moving from Twenty Twelve to Up The Women

With the Olympics long gone, Jessica Hynes is hoping her new suffragette sitcom will pull in the votes.

Jessica Hynes interview

I caught up with Jessica Hynes at a private screening of some Georgian photos in London that she'd helped to organise, to chat all things Up The Women. Here's what the lady herself had to say...

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The brilliant innuendo in the title alone is enough to sell BBC Four's new suffragette comedy, but for those of you who need more convincing (you awkward blighters) we've got plenty of reasons why you should give Up The Women a spin.

Firstly, it's written by cult favourite turned award winner (thank you Spaced and Twenty Twelve) Jessica Hynes, who also stars in the show alongside Rebecca Front - aka the woman that's appeared in practically every classic British comedy of the last two decades. And on top of that, the premise of timid Banbury woman Margaret (Hynes) attempting to convince her arts and crafts group to join the suffrage movement sounds like absolute gold. We're gonna be talking in cut-glass accents for weeks afterwards...

From Monty Python and The Holy Grail to Blackadder, it's long been established that one of the underlying rules of historical comedy is to subvert the period setting with knowingly incongruous nods to the present day. Which is all well and good when employed as part of a wider comic arsenal, but cheap and wearying when overdone.

Unfortunately, that's the fatal undoing of Jessica Hynes' Edwardian-era sitcom Up The Women, which drills away at the supposedly hilarious spectacle of characters from the past failing to comprehend things we now take for granted.

Thus we have Adrian Scarborough's hapless caretaker getting into a pickle over the installation of a light bulb, and Rebecca Front's bullying snob sniffily dismissing electricity as a fad that'll never catch on. These moments, I should point out, are clearly regarded by Hynes and her five co-writers as rib-tickling conceits of massive comic import. Given that Hynes is a fine actress and co-writer of fondly regarded sitcom Spaced, the unrelenting weakness of her latest effort is hugely disappointing. It's not unreasonable to expect more from one of Britain's foremost comedy performers.

The only truly notable aspect of Up The Women is that it's a traditional studio-bound sitcom accompanied by a live laughter track, an ancient form new to "high-brow" BBC 4. But that presents its own problems; you can clearly hear the underwhelmed audience almost willing themselves to laugh as gag after gag falls flat.

Lines such as "I've had to swaddle mother again, and she really does put up quite a fight" and "Does your husband know you're cavorting with skirted anarchists?" have the rhythmic cadence of funny dialogue, but they're not actually witty in themselves. A sense of embarrassingly forced whimsy hangs over its attempts to revel in florid language à la Blackadder. But Hynes and co aren't in the same league as Curtis and Elton at their peak.

The characters speak in a combination of BBC Edwardiana and anachronistic contemporary argot, which, if one were feeling charitable, could be regarded as a parody of Andrew Davies' penchant for dropping contemporary terms into his period dramas. But the paucity of wit on display means it's all for naught.

Hynes plays a timid yet worldly-wise idealist whose belief in the suffragette movement throws her into sharp conflict with Front's stubbornly immovable conservative. And that's about it. All concerned - including an almost unrecognisable Vicki Pepperdine from Getting On as a daffy, buck-toothed housekeeper - deliver game performances, but no amount of gusto can compensate for such poor material. Having wasted such a fine cast, Up The Women merely wanders along to unremarkable effect.

Even taking into account the inherent difficulties of introducing a brand new sitcom over the course of 30 minutes, this lifeless groaner has to be regarded as a failure.

Jessica Hynes chooses an unlikely subject for comedy

Og all the subjects funny enough to base a sitcom around, women's suffrage probably isn't top of most comedy writers' lists. But that failed to deter Twenty Twelve star Jessica Hynes from wringing jokes from the Edwardian women's struggle for the vote - she's written a very funny three-part sitcom about it for BBC Four, Up The Women.

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