Did we like it?

The first course was a sumptuous joy with many richly flavoured moments that would prick the taste buds of the most fastidious dilettante, but the second course palled as it offered little additional piquancy to the palate.

What was good about it?

• Julia Davis portrayed the monstrous Fanny Cradock with dollops of relish, and garnished her performance with a lurid facemask of a thick dustcloud of make-up that obscured her features.

• The way Fanny treated Johnnie, those whom she worked with or her minions (the hapless Simon and Derek), made Simon Cowell look like Laa-Laa from the Teletubbies. As she recorded an episode of her BBC cookery series she sneered: “Poor Derek’s hands are shaking. He gets very nervous on television.” Television was far from Derek’s mind, it was the tongue-lashing he would inevitably receive from Fanny that really scared him.

• Also, Fanny’s lack of humanity (a trait that burdened the programme later on) was acutely shown when she meets her long lost son Christopher for the first time and hugs him not with joy but as though reclaiming a possession. Afterwards, she asks Johnnie: “Did I hug him too much?”

• In contrast, Mark Gatiss was wonderfully understated as Fanny’s screen stooge and partner (in that order) Johnnie. It was only after that Fanny had made a fool of herself that he summoned up the courage and fortitude to express more than the pruned, stunted sentences with which he usually flattered her. Often, he seemed to wander about in a daze as if caught in a maelstrom of blind loyalty or terror, such as when he creeps back into bed after letting in Christopher who has been gadabouting all over London fearful of waking the sleeping dragon.

• And the rest of the cast were splendid too with Nick Burns flourishing in the role of Christopher and Hayley Atwell as the shy home help Jane. In fact, Christopher’s introduction resuscitated the script as once he was submerged into Fanny’s world he became as arrogant and morally dissolute as she was (although he got drunk rather than treating those around him like scum), but later he became the only person to stand up to his mother adding some much-needed friction to the dialogue.

• The epilogue in 1990, in which a patently senile Fanny shuffles through her nursing home pausing only to mutter in revulsion at her TV cookery legacy as rancid human allotment Gary Rhodes prances about the screen.

What was bad about it?

• For whatever reasons, the mock-ups of the black and white television pictures from the 60s simply didn’t ring true. Perversely, they suffered from being too perfect, too bereft of flaws.

• For much of the piece, Fanny’s character was too dominating, never removing her jagged knees from their collective ribcage and allowing them to breathe. Had Fanny been portrayed as a multi-faceted woman this may not have been a problem, but she was a one-dimensional monster. This wasn’t too much of a blight in the first half as her barbed tongue was still acidicly amusing yet when she showed no willingness to change or develop no matter what mishap befell her, it became rather boring. Even after Christopher and Jane leave together to start a new life, any sympathy the viewer may have had for the old battleaxe was dispelled when she predictably telephoned Jane’s mother to denounce her daughter as a harlot.

• When Jane is almost press-ganged into becoming one of Fanny’s minions/surrogate children, Fanny coerces her into making and buttering some slices of toast. Derek whispers to Simon that Fanny gets people to do the small things first before enslaving them for the obvious benefit of the audience. If we were watching dunces’ paradise ITV2, then such direction might not be surprising, but on the intellectual melting pot of BBC4 no such exposition should be needed.

• Fanny was effectively banished from television after castigating a housewife who has dreamt up a menu to serve PM Ted Heath. If only Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh could suffer a similar fate today.