The new sitcom Boomers (BBC One, Friday, 9pm) is about a group of relatives and friends in their sixties and seventies, and it's wonderful, mainly because the characters are instantly recognisable but also because it's about older people and isn't an episode of Last Of The Summer Wine.

Or rather it's like an episode of Last Of The Summer Wine that's been passed through a knife sharpener.

The characters are all familiar archetypes, which, if you are British and have a family, you will know well. You will also recognise the awkward situations (particularly in the first episode, which is set at a funeral) and almost everyone in the cast, which is made up of famous older actors including Stephanie Beacham, Alison Steadman, Nigel Planer and Russ Abbot.

All of them have taken to their characters with great relish for the grotesquery and horror of family life, but Steadman and Beacham are particularly good.

Steadman plays the kind of slightly fragrant, frightening matriarch that's common in Middle Britain: beautifully dressed by Debenhams (in the sale) and beautifully clear in her views which were formed in her twenties and have hardened ever since. She is a brilliant character, brilliantly played.

Stephanie Beacham is just as good, although she plays a woman who is one rung further up the social ladder, or at least she thinks she is.

She is the type whose view of the world is generally from a 4x4; the type that wears a fascinator but is never fascinated, because all she really thinks about is herself.

"It's a funeral," she says to her husband at one point. "Let's just try and enjoy it."

There are many other great one-liners like that one, most of which play on the awkwardness but familiarity of a typical funeral.

At one point, Beacham gets talking about the last time she saw the woman who has died.

"I was talking to her on Skype and she did look pale but that might have been our broadband reception," she says, "It's always worse in the kitchen."

She also tells one of her relatives about the perils of dating when you're older.

"I mean, you take on their friends, their family," she says, "but at our age you've got to weigh up the chances of being lumbered with their funeral as well."

The writer of Boomers, Richard Pinto, who has also written for The Armstrong & Miller Show and The Kumars At No 42, explores a lot more of this dark territory in the first episode, but it works because he seems to have recognised that humour almost always has a shadow over it: most of the best jokes are dark ones.

This does also give the first episode a melancholic edge at times, partly because the characters are looking over their shoulder at the colour and excitement of youth but partly because it's a shock to see so many of the most familiar faces of British acting looking so old.

When, for example, did Nigel Planer, who played Neil in The Young Ones, get old and bald?

And how old does that make me?