Both as a female solo act and as a pivotal figure of sketch comedy, Catherine Tate now rules the distaff castle that was built from the ground up by Victoria Wood. Tate is a worthy successor, and has opened up a whole new, and sometimes frightening, frame of reference: the British under-class. In Tate's gallery of grotesques, a moronic, sociopathic teenager has no redeeming features. It could be said that Tate's Nan, the harridan who can't keep her knees together while she mouths obscenities, goes all the way back beyond Shakespeare. But the continuity was broken in the Victorian age, and even Oscar Wilde had to dress up his witch as Lady Bracknell.