Julianne Moore, Tony Curran, in audacious take on King James

Fittingly, the show was originally titled Pandemonium. The trek to the screen was nothing personal to Here We Go. The failure rate for sitcoms in general is high. Like those baby turtles racing for the sea in Planet Earth, many start the race to the water but not all make it.

Here We Go was also a mockumentary, another crowded zone, the central premise being that the Jessops’ teenage son is filming the family for a school project.

Yet none of that mattered because Basden’s writing was top tier and the cast even better: Jim Howick (Ghosts) plays Paul, dad of the family, and Katherine Parkinson (The IT Crowd) his wife, Rachel. Basden plays Tom, Rachel’s brother, and then there is the queen of comedy herself, Alison Steadman, as Paul’s mum, Sue. Together they can do it all, from laugh-out-loud visual gags to quietly moving moments.

Here We Go. Pictured: Alison Steadman as Sue Jessop, Katherine Parkinson as Rachel Jessop and Jim Howick as Paul Jessop (Image: free)

The style, and the opening tune, has echoes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like Larry David’s classic, each episode centres on something that ought to be simple going horribly, but amusingly, wrong.

This series has been taken up with preparations for Tom’s marriage to Cherry (Toni Allen-Martin), with last week’s penultimate episode featuring “the dress”, a visit from Rachel’s Insta-perfect sister, and a bunch of lilies. I’m with Paul all the way on lilies. Also making an appearance was Howick’s co-star from Ghosts, Simon Farnaby (who plays the trouserless scandal-hit MP alongside Howick’s scout master).

Both series are on iPlayer, and at half an hour each episode it doesn’t take long to catch up.

Julianne Moore is the latest Oscar-winning actor to take to the small screen with Mary & George (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, 9pm). In fairness to Moore, she’s no Julianne come lately. Some of her first roles were in TV soaps and she has always championed independent filmmakers offering something different.

Such a description suits Mary and George, which opens with the kind of birth you will never see on Call the Midwife. It is 1592 and Mary (Moore) is bringing a son into the world with the “help” of two cack-handed servants. As a second son not much is expected of young George. “What use are you to anybody?” the doting mother asks.

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His role, in time, will be to marry moderately well and pave the way for Mary’s firstborn son to make a more lucrative match. It’s all about the money in Mary & George: who has it (mostly men) and who doesn’t (mostly women and certainly not Mary, who has married her way to what little fortune she possesses).

It is while married to her latest husband that Mary learns of a possible visit from King James VI of Scotland and I of England (Tony Curran). Such is the king’s fearsome reputation as a guest, Mary’s husband advises that they do the 17th century equivalent of hiding behind the sofa and pretending they are not home. But Mary, as ever, spies an opportunity for advancement. There just might be a different future ahead for George after all.

Moore’s mother emigrated to the US from Greenock in the 1950s. The actor has always spoken warmly about her Scottish ancestry, and before playing the part she put herself through a crash course in Jacobean history.

Billed by Sky Atlantic as an “audacious historical psychodrama”, and in keeping with the tumultuous times in which it is set, Mary and George is a rollicking, few-holds-barred watch full of effing and blinding. The costumes are terrific, George, Mary and the King make quite the trio, and to seal the deal Simon Russell Beale pops up as one of Mary’s husbands. Based on a true story, too.

For an altogether more gentle take on history there is Lily and Lolly: the Forgotten Yeats Sisters (free to view Sky Arts, Friday, 8pm). The Lily and Lolly of the title were Susan and Elizabeth Yeats. Although accomplished artists and cultural pioneers in the Ireland of the 1920s, it was the sisters’ fate to forever take second billing to their famous brother, WB Yeats.

Yeats, or rather his poem, The Second Coming, seems everywhere at the moment (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”). Perfect time, then, for singer and songwriter Imelda May, with the help of the creme de la creme of Dublin academia, to bring the sisters into the spotlight in their own right.