Lizzie and Sarah

This was the only still I could find, because the BBC is scared of funny!

Last Saturday, BBC 2 screened an absolutely cracking pilot by Jessica Hynes (née Stephenson) and Julia Davis. These two ladies were the driving forces behind, respectively, Spaced and Nighty Night, so it's a fair bet that their latest venture was going to be pretty solid stuff. However, whichever soulless gonk at the Corporation decides these things got sufficiently cold feet about the programme's content that it was screened at the viewer-friendly time of quarter to midnight.

In my experience, if you're up at quarter to midnight it's generally because something interesting's happening to you or you're happening interestingly to someone else, not because you're waiting for something to come on the telly - the only people who are up channel hopping are fifteen year old boys hoping to see some nipple on a late night Channel 4 import, or poor sods who'll watch anything to avoid going to sleep because they've run someone over or something. It is not, let us be clear, a prime time slot.

This is particularly frustrating, because Lizzie and Sarah was brilliant. I'm afraid you'll have to take that on faith, because it's already disappeared from iPlayer - we can but hope that the hugely positive response it's got from real journalists (cf. Caitlin Moran's excellent review here) make up for its inevitably low ratings. Hynes and Davis star as the eponymous downtrodden housewives and cameo as perfectly realised archetypal teenage girls - not the sort that actually exist, but what we imagine all the ones we've never met are like. I hope the same can be said of their main roles, simply because the myriad minor tragedies of Lizzie and Sarah's lives can make for desperately uncomfortable viewing - I don't think I'd have been able to laugh without convincing myself that nobody actually has it this bad.

I can't quite imagine how the precise world established by Lizzie and Sarah could be adapted into a series, so Hynes and Davis' intention was presumably to showcase the characters and style of writing upon which they want to expand. This is so massively exciting it's in danger of making a vein in my forehead twitch like a Disney villain - with the exception of the peerless The Thick of It and last year's excellent miniseries Getting On, BBC comedy seems to have lost the knack of making intelligent, unafraid programmes with enough carefully integrated darkness to make my girlfriend protest loudly and bury herself in Grazia. Lizzie and Sarah suggests that Jessica Hynes and Julia Davis could reverse this trend all on their own, but they're going to get nowhere if they keep being given graveyard slots.