Catherine Tate

Both as a female solo act and as a pivotal figure of sketch comedy, Catherine Tate now rules the distaff castle that was built from the ground up by Victoria Wood. Tate is a worthy successor, and has opened up a whole new, and sometimes frightening, frame of reference: the British under-class. In Tate's gallery of grotesques, a moronic, sociopathic teenager has no redeeming features. It could be said that Tate's Nan, the harridan who can't keep her knees together while she mouths obscenities, goes all the way back beyond Shakespeare. But the continuity was broken in the Victorian age, and even Oscar Wilde had to dress up his witch as Lady Bracknell. Tate gives us the full House of Horrors termagant. She does so, as she does everything else, with an acute ear for language and a protean acting ability which is perhaps her sole drawback, because her admirers can only dread the prospect that she might be too often lured aside to speak lines that other people write. I, too, liked her in Doctor Who, but the Catherine Tate Show  is where her real gift for drama is on sumptuous display, and the public is right when it buys the DVD boxes by the trolley-load. Talking to her, I was nervously aware that I might be face to face with an historic movement. Luckily she chose to be kind, but I had an uneasy sense that she might be gathering material, and that I was it.