Part two of Star World's latest raid on the BBC's sitcom archives, To The Manor Born starring Penelope Keith, airs tonight at 8.30pm. For the uninitiated, the basic premise of To The Manor Born is that a recently widowed member of the landed gentry, Audrey Forbes-Hamilton, played by Keith, is forced to move out of her great big stately home into the gatekeeper's cottage.
From there she keeps up unceasing hostilities against the new owner, Richard DeVere, whom she loathes on three counts. First, he took her house away; second, he is in trade; and third, he turns out not to be properly British at all. The bounder! It sounds dated now: in truth, it was dated back in the early 1980s when it first broadcast on British television. Much of Audrey's bullying of everyone around her from faithful retainers to best friends, and including the true gentleman, DeVere, is rather painful. But not as painful as it might have been, thanks to Penelope Keith.
She started as Margot Leadbetter - the snobbish, humourless neighbour in The Good Life - and established herself as a performer who can play thoroughly insensitive, bossy women and still appeal to audiences.
Sadly, or perhaps wisely, she has never really tried to play any other kind of woman. Her latest role is as Maggie in Next of Kin, a grandmother on the brink of retiring to the South of France with her husband when they learn their only son has died and they will have to raise his three children.
This is apparently supposed to be a comedy, not a weepie, and Maggie's lack of distress when she receives the news, 'I never really liked him', is an odd echo of Audrey's decision to crack open Champagne at her husband's funeral. It's not really funny, when you stop to think about it, but Keith's gift is that you don't.
Keith has firmly stuck to what she knows, comedy, but John Goodman took a bit of a risk when he took the lead role in The Babe (Pearl, 9.30pm). The movie is a slightly sanitised biopic of American baseball's greatest hero, Babe Ruth. Ruth played back in the 1920s when baseball was the greatest spectator sport in the United States. He is so famous even people who don't even really know what a home run means know he was very, very good even by today's standards.