In her own words, Jill Tyrell is an attractive 27-year-old with a lust for life and a flexible spine.

In reality, she's a devious, manipulative, evil passive-aggressive with one eye on the main chance and the other on handsome new neighbour Don Cole. And we don't believe the 27 years old bit either.

She's also a hairdresser who'd give Sweeney Todd nightmares - in her beauty salon, one customer is smothered to death by cling film while having a body wrap, and another is driven to suicide after a trademark Jill cut.

Deep down though, Jill just wants to be loved. But unfortunately not by her own husband Terry, whose diagnosis with inoperable cancer at the beginning of the first series is just the fresh start Jill needs.

She ships Terry off to the nearest hospice (against medical advice, since Terry is still fully capable of living day-to-day life to the full) and starts playing the tragic widow in an attempt to get Don's attention. Small hiccups like Don's wife Cath, who has MS and often uses a wheelchair, are not going to get in her way. she'll go to any lengths to get him - deception, dressing up as his ex-mistress, even the odd murder or two.

Of course, all good murderers need accomplices, and that's where Linda and Glen come in. Linda is Jill’s assistant at her salon, and is always at Jill’s beck-and-call – largely because Linda’s terrified of her. But for a long time, behind that facade of puppydog devotion, Linda was hiding a terrible secret from Jill - it was she who had sex with Terry while Jill was in Bristol watching Phantom on Ice. And when Jill found out, she very nearly killed her.

Glen is also besotted with Jill, having met Jill through the Lasso the Moon dating agency. A widower, he was looking for love after the death of his wife Rachel. Glen describes his personality as Scottish, and he's not fussy when it comes to women. As long as they have two eyes and a nice personality... he's not so keen on bottoms though.

He was very taken with Jill, but she wasn't interested. However when he told her about his inheritance, she realised she did love him after all, and moved in with him. His blind devotion to Jill (plus his desperate desire for the intercourse) led him to poisoning the Vicar, confessing to murder and then poisoning himself. And after all that, he never even got the intercourse.

Writer and performer Julia Davis constructed a brilliantly black sitcom, billed as "a West Country Fatal Attraction". Jill was a classic anti-hero, constantly shocking everyone with a new low just when we thought she'd hit rock bottom. Despite Cath's constant efforts to turn the other cheek and believe that Jill wasn't deliberately trying to steal her husband, eventually her patience snapped and she left Don – though they later headed to a new town to attempt to patch up their marriage.

Jill, of course, followed them and resumed her quest to drive a wedge between Cath and Don, culminating in a furious Cath throwing her wheelchair off a cliff while fighting with Jill, only for it to land on Don's head. Jill got her man in the end – severely brain-damaged, but hey, she got him.