Fond farewells and stiff upper lips

Weekend TV reviewed: Foyle's War; Pulling; Gavin & Stacey; Britain's Got Talent

It was May 1945 and Sam Stewart admitted to a terrible thought: “Part of me can't help wishing the war would go on for another year.” Well, that was certainly what its creator, Anthony Horowitz, was wishing for when then ITV controller, Simon Shaps, peremptorily cancelled Foyle's War (ITV1). He had not even got round to writing 1944. That said, I was impressed by Horowitz's discipline in keeping score-settling out of the final episode last night. The baddy, easily identified from the start, was called Longmate, not Shaps, and even the spiv selling over-priced union flags was listed on the credits as “Spiv”, not Grade.

In fact, the whole script was refreshingly lacking in dramatic irony. Longmate, hotelier and prospective Tory candidate, was so unconvinced of the inevitability of a landslide in the coming election - as all Conservatives were meant to be - that he planned to bribe every voter in Hastings with free booze on VE Day. The only bit of historical irony Horowitz deployed was when Longmate interviewed Sam for a job as his PA. He asked her what she thought of the Beveridge report. She said she was “all for that”. But, didn't she also want to reduce taxes? “Can't you do both?” she replied brightly, marking herself down as the very first Cameronite.

Horowitz writes better dialogue for Sam than for anybody else. Usually he goes easy on the period slang, but Sam is an old-fashioned girl and when she says, “It's my first day here and I'm not much cop at it!” she sounds both in period and in character. Watching Honeysuckle Weeks as Sam has been one of the series' delights. As Foyle's army-uniformed driver, Sam is so starchy you imagine she takes Blanco to bed with her. Last night, Foyle's son returned from the war, apologised for being a cad and announced he was still in love with her. Manning a desk at the Soldiers, Airmen and Families Association, she swooned not and said she could give him a leaflet for it. “You don't have a leaflet on love, do you?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “but I have quite a few on desertion.”

Even by television standards, the axing of Foyle’s War by ITV1 seemed a peculiar decision. None of the cast had left. The ratings remained high. Both the war itself and crime in the Hastings area were chugging along nicely. In fact, Shaps, the man who wielded the axe, has since announced his departure from ITV – and there’s now talk of a Foyle’s Peace showing up at some stage. Nonetheless, the original programme still had to obey orders by winding itself up with uncharacteristic haste. So it was that the camera last night soon panned across the newspaper headline “Hitler Dead” – while Foyle himself (Michael Kitchen) spent much of the time planning either his retirement or the town’s VE celebrations.

Of course, the first rule of TV reviewing is never to decide what you’re going to write before watching the programme. Even so, I must confess that my plan for today was twofold: movingly lament the passing of Foyle’s War, and powerfully argue that there must always be room for this sort of gentle, unflashy drama. Unfortunately, the plan turned out to have one major flaw – yesterday’s final episode was so rubbish that it made you wonder if the series had ever been any good at all. Most strikingly, the dialogue went well beyond the merely wooden, and became a kind of weirdly sustained parody of creaky old whodunits and stiff-upper-lip war films. As for the plot, its main effect was to prove just how big the difference can be between the unflashy and the almost wilfully dull.

After nearly an hour of VE committee meetings and the lumbering establishment of motives for everybody, we did see an anonymous hand pick up a large knife. Doctor Ziegler (John Ramm) then gave that surprised smile of greeting to an off-screen figure which invariably signifies the smiler’s imminent murder. Yet, if you thought this might herald a new urgency in proceedings, you were wrong. Instead, Foyle ambled about for another hour or so before revealing that the killer was the programme’s obvious baddie. Admittedly, there were several subplots as well – but each of them made a separate point about the end of the war far too carefully to be properly dramatic. A man called Eddie (Paul Thornley), for example, seemed less like a real bloke who’d recently been demobbed, and more like an oddly lifeless emblem of The Returning Soldier.

The capacity of ITV, which cannot even show its new import Pushing Daisies without messing up, for self-harm is incredible. The show's whodunnits are Heath-Robinson contraptions, but its sense of period is impeccable and Michael Kitchen as Foyle is a complete master of effective, minimalist acting that makes you want more. ITV's problem was presumably the demographics: less than 4 per cent of the show's audience is under 34. But it still attracts seven million viewers. You would have thought Michael Grade would be as loathe to lose them as Longmate his putative voters.

You may feel it's a little late to mention it but Pulling isn't half bad. And if that sounds a little grudging as a recommendation it's probably because I'm still getting over the reflexive flinch I gave when I first saw it. The episode in question began with Donna (the lovely Sharon Horgan) administering desultory hand-relief to her gormless boyfriend, Karl, and watching this scene I marked the series down as adolescently keen to shock and scratched it from my watch list. Now that I've checked back I find that the snap-judgement wasn't exactly wrong, but that in among the self-conscious lairiness there's a lot of funny stuff too. And to be honest even some of the self-conscious lairiness turns out to be funny, such as a scene in which Donna's flatmate, Louise, pitched her business plan for penis-shaped ice lollies to a potential backer, in impeccable Dragons' Den style.

What's really winning about it though is not its appetite for the baser appetites but the beady eye it casts on self-deception, mostly expressed through Donna, who dumped Karl on the brink of marriage and moved in with two friends, but then found herself unable to move on. Donna is the sort of woman who sits down for a quiet evening in to watch An Inconvenient Truth, but gets bored within five minutes and puts The Day After Tomorrow on instead, more successfully provoked into ecological probity by a Hollywood fantasy than Al Gore's PowerPoint lecture. Donna doesn't want to marry Karl, but she doesn't want anyone else to either, and she's very keen that he should mind about their separation more than she does. Horgan (who also co-wrote the script) plays the character with a whisper more dim-wittedness than I would like (clever people can kid themselves too) but she has a real eye for the way that self-interest can kink like a telephone cord, until you haven't a clue about how to get it untangled again.

This week, Donna discovered that Karl had put his house on the market and stood to make a sizeable profit, a revelation that provoked a spasm of resentment in her. "Who practically bought this house for you?" she asked, confident that having identified the estate agent in which he found the details and had a couple of conversations about knocking through the dining room entitles her to a share of the equity. And her outrage isn't funny because it's entirely unjustified (although it is) but because we recognise the bind she's in – in her head the house was a shared property and the fact that she only has herself to blame for the fact that it isn't is too unsatisfactory to face squarely. Most of us would have kept this unworthy fact to ourselves, rather than blurt it out publicly but then that's often the difference between comedy and real life.

All of which meant that the saddest farewell of the night came with Gavin & Stacey (BBC3), which is now only a couple of Christmas specials away from disappearing forever. Gavin & Stacey covers much of the same material as Pulling – what men and women want, and why they never quite align – but does it in much less scabrous style. Like Pulling, it also finds room for quite sizeable stretches of melancholy, where the comedy disappears altogether and you find yourself watching a domestic drama instead.

I won't lie to you, as they say in Barry: the last episode of the present run was not the funniest. Nevertheless, there were some good lines, particularly from Nessa, whose full name was revealed to be Vanessa Shanessa Jenkins. She and Stacey's mum were sitting together reading. Putting down a miz-lit memoir called Please Mummy No, she asked what Nessa's book was about. Nessa, looked up from The Satanic Verses, and preferred not to say: she did not want another fatwa. Nessa is either a fantasist or has the backstory to end all backstories. The beautiful joke of Gavin & Stacey is that we decide.

It was a busy episode for Nessa (the peerless Ruth Jones), working in the high street as a silver-coated Oliver Hardy robot, leading on Dave the syphilitic coachman, and giving birth to Smithy's baby, a task achieved amid an awful lot of mooing. While we rely on Nessa and Smithy (James Corden, Jones's co-author) and the increasingly out-of-the-closet Uncle Bryn for the comedy, it is the quiet couple at the heart of the story who keep asking the question: is love really all you need?

Stacey appeared to be on the point of breaking off her relationship with Gavin forever – on the rather slender basis of the insurmountable cultural differences between a native of Barry Island and an Essex boy. Last week's episode ended with Stacey asking her new, and newly estranged, husband if they were going to be “all right”. She began yesterday's saying she thought they wouldn't be. Yes, she loved Gavin but it seemed as if she loved Barry (as in Island) more. Fortunately, this glum plot line was interrupted by Nessa's contractions, arriving a month early and prompting a frantic search for Smithy. I wasn't entirely convinced that Bryn would have put on a rubber glove and checked on Nessa's cervical dilation – a gag that seemed to cut against the grain of the character – but his deep satisfaction at the purchase of a 60G iPod was absolutely on the button. "After I've put all mine on I've still got room for 49,853 songs... which I see as positive."

To be honest, the second series probably wasn’t as good as the first – and at times gave the impression that it had caught the show’s creators slightly on the hop. After all, why else would they have suddenly given the two title characters the sort of problems that should have come before their marriage rather than after it? (Especially as this ran the risk of making both Gavin and Stacey quite annoying.) Luckily, there was always the rest of the cast, led by Jones and Corden themselves – but increasingly dominated by Rob Brydon as Uncle Bryn. In the end too, last night’s episode, like all the others, winningly managed to combine the framework of a warmly traditional sitcom with elements (or often just hints) of something far stranger, darker and ruder around the outside. Plenty of comedy series, for instance, have served up a final episode in which all the characters hurtle towards a maternity unit. Not many have featured the woman in labour (Jones) calmly demanding sex, or the father-to-be (Corden) making it clear to anyone who’ll listen that “she’s not my girlfriend”.

In Britain's Got Talent (ITV1, Saturday), a man called Simon shows off his ability to lean back in his chair, flash his expensive teeth and wink, all at the same time. He winks at a 13-year-old boy from Billericay and at a 32-year-old Filipina club singer. Maybe lose the winking, Simon - it's creepy and worrying, both at the same time.

A woman called Amanda shows she can change her hair 73 times in one show and have a really shiny face, without saying anything of interest at all. And a man called Piers does his impression of the man called Simon - quite well, actually. I think Piers would like to be Simon. He doesn't have the teeth or the tan, though. Or the charm. Simon makes you boo and hiss, and want to go for a pint with him. Piers makes you boo and hiss, and want to headbutt him.

None of them - the judges - show any talent for spotting talent. They allow the disturbing little crooner through to the next round. They always do, ever since Gareth Gates. If you're a fresh-faced young lad and you want to get on in one of these shows, just put some product in your hair and sing a Frank Sinatra song - and that's it, you're through to the next round, with a wink from Simon if you're lucky. Lots of boring dancers get through, too, and a comedian who tells really bad jokes. But two genuinely original and hysterical acts - a post-modern ironic political impressionist, plus a herd of anarchic ferrets, who refuse to dance but have sex and escape instead - leave our judges unmoved. The fools.