Faced with a family gathering, world-weary Stephen Febble does his best to be difficult. When his daughter, her dreary husband Alan, their precocious child and - not least - the dog come to stay for the weekend it's enough to make him reach for the whisky, and for the sarcasm. The climax arrives on Saturday night when his patient wife Virginia has laid on a dinner party and the chiropodist comes too.

In his first stage play, The Weekend, Michael Palin takes a look at family values with black humour.