It is 43 years since John Cleese last appeared in a BBC sitcom. You may remember it – hotel in Torquay, rude owner, hapless staff. Fawlty Towers only ran for 12 episodes in the Seventies but no British sitcom has ever had quite the same cultural impact. As Shane Allen, the BBC’s head of comedy commissioning, put it when he announced Cleese’s return: “His last one did alright.”

It certainly did. But those hoping for something similar to Fawlty Towers will have been surprised by Hold the Sunset (BBC One), a defiantly unflashy comedy, whose first episode took place mostly in a nondescript kitchen in suburbia. There was so little action, it would have worked perfectly well as a radio play. And yet, with a first-rate cast led by Cleese and Alison Steadman, reuniting on screen 32 years after starring as husband and wife in Clockwise, as well as a cracking script by Monty Python collaborator Charles McKeown, it fizzed with comic energy.

Cleese plays Phil, a widower whose friendship with Edith (Steadman), a widow who lives across the road, has very quietly developed into something more. There was a tenderness to the way they interacted, and hints of a shared melancholy. Their mutual affection was never overstated, just a gentle touch of the elbow here or a fond admonishment there. “Oh, shut up and have a biscuit,” Edith said to Phil after he made a clumsy, harmless pass at breakfast.