Television Review

MURDER MOST HORRID (BBC2) has just embarked on its fourth series. The show was designed as a display case for Dawn French's range as an actress, but I can't say I've ever come away from an episode thinking, my God she really lost herself in that role. Whether you like it or not, there is something about French's screen personality that is resistant to camouflage - the gigantic mouth, the obvious eyes, the generous roll of the haunches. She is somehow larger than anybody she is assigned to inhabit. When the gifted Emma Chambers won a British Comedy award for her performance in The Vicar of Dibley, I read it as a mild rebuke for French's less sophisticated style of comic acting.

French was made for Murder Most Horrid. Although each episode is written by a different band, the house style matches broad comedy to a broad comedian. In "Frozen", last night's opening episode by Nick Vivian, French played one of a blameless pair of unmarried, village-dwelling sisters who, unbeknown to each other, were both hot to trot. One sister had her eye on the vicar, while French fancied the plumber who came to mend the freezer where they kept a store of goodies to tide them over during postwar rationing.

The plumber introduced himself as the man to fix her frigidity problem. Though the script was stuffed with many more corny double entendres ("You'd like to put a nice plump bird on our table, wouldn't you?" said the village butcher to his son), it also worked on a subtler level. A canny parallel was drawn between food rationing and sexual repression: both are a kind of publicly decreed austerity measure, circumvented only by guilty subterfuge. The breakdown of the freezer coincided with the moment the dam reining in French's desires burst, causing the death by squashing of the unfortunate plumber. He was thrown into the freezer, which was stolen by the butcher - who was then imprisoned on a charge of cannibalism.

This being a French vehicle, there was also a rich selection of jokes about fatness and sweetness. After she killed the plumber, French's character consoled herself by downing half a chocolate cake. It might as well have been called "Sex and Chocolate", but French has already starred in a (useless) drama going by the same name. Not that she's into stereotyping or anything.

Heligan: The Return (C4) revisits the gardens in Cornwall whose retrieval from an overgrown wilderness was documented in The Lost Gardens of Heligan. I feel like I'm mugging an old lady when I say this, but it may be a gardening programme too far. They got the story last time round, and this is the horticultural equivalent of a Hollywood sequel: same old story, only now you already know what happens. The other problem is that the programme has no idea if it's fish or fowl. Is it about plants or plantsmen, gardens or gardeners? It may well be the first example of a new hybrid genre, a hortisoap, in which small inconsequential incidents unfold so slowly you can't actually see them happening. It's as boring as watching plants grow. Here's my handy tip for gardening programme makers: there are no plots in plots.