Alan Davies

Leading up to the British Comedy Awards, Comic's Choice invited five celebrated comedians - Alan Davies, Sean Lock, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes, Lee Mack - to choose a shortlist and winner from among their own personal past favourites. Bill Bailey played affable host, something he does effortlessly.

Forgetting for one moment the universally acknowledged truth that no comic truly enjoys any laughter they haven't themselves produced, the show's premise was flimsy in the extreme. Not to mention confusing - Alan Davies nominated Chris Morris as Best Breakthrough Act for work done in 1994.

Davies also took part in a film recreation of an unsuccessful audition he once attended, as gratuitous a piece of padding as I have seen in a long time. This lack of coherence was reflected in the meaningless studio set design which threw together leather armchairs, old boilers, stuffed elk heads and bicycles combined to create the effect of a gentleman's club located in a garage.

Basically Comic's Choice was yet another excuse to disinter old archive clips instead of producing fresh comedy. Although, having said that, the archive clips were rather excellent, so I'm not complaining too loudly.

On the face of it, Comic's Choice looked as if it was going to be negligibly mediocre. It had the kind of jaunty animated title sequence we've seen a hundred times before, and the pre-broadcast description indicated that it was yet another clip-show, one of those comedians-talking-to-comedians affairs that can occasionally make contemporary broadcasting look like a vast job-creation scheme for underemployed stand-ups. The saving grace here is that one of the comedians (the presenter one) is Bill Bailey. Not only can he play his own signature tune but he's got a manner that somehow makes the format work, which is handy for Channel 4, since it's on every night this week, as a curtain-raiser to the British Comedy Awards this coming weekend.

That's the premise. The British Comedy Awards do flavour of the month, while this short series explores more durable supremacy, with each guest nominating and selecting their best of the best in various categories. Last night, Alan Davies was in the selector's chair, and quickly demonstrated one problem with the structure of the programme, which is that there's no proof in comedy. Davies had nominated Dave Allen as Best Male Comic, on the strength of a live West End performance he once saw. But, of course, there was no clip of that, and even if there had been it may not have made his case for him. It doesn't hugely matter, though, because Bailey is affable and funny enough to fill the gaps - on great form last night pretending to sulk about one of Davies's other nominations, the "sexy little jazz weasel" Noel Fielding, who once bumped him off a captain's slot on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

When actors talk warmly about other actors who inspired them, the results are embarrassing, as a rule. But the same doesn't apply to comedians, for some reason: get them talking about other comics and the results can be tart, revealing and funny. That's the idea here as part of the extra hoo-ha that Channel 4 is drumming up around next week's British Comedy Awards. The idea is that Bill Bailey chats to a different comedian each night about his or her comedy heroes. What are their all-time favourite shows and which comedian would they give their own personal award to? Bailey begins with selections from Alan Davies - always smarter than he pretends to be - and later in the week there's hero worship from Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock.

As the British Comedy Awards gets a revamp and moves to Channel 4 from ITV, Bill presents five companion shows in the week running up to the big event, on Saturday. In each he interviews a top British comedian about their comic likes and dislikes. First it's Alan Davies, with Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock to follow on consecutive nights.

The set is bedecked with ivy and gargolyles; Stephen Fry has a fez on; his four guests are wearing hooded capes. It's all because tonight, H is for hocus-pocus, a magic-themed Christmas special with the most famous wizard of them all, Daniel Radcliffe, joining the ranks of naughty pupils trying to second guess Professor Fry's fascinating facts. The show nearly comes off the rails when Lee Mack, on brilliant form, has a spelling-related set-to with the host. "Are you incapable of rational thought?" wails Fry, "You can't be that stupid!" Mack's punishment is to end the show sawn in half by Alan Davies (Radcliffe suffers worse), but before then we discover what the word "muggle" originally meant, and hear an intriguing theory about cracker jokes.

I like comedies, I like dramas. Comedy-dramas I've never been sure about and Dirk Gently has all but convinced me they don't work. The eponymous hero is a detective who believes in "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" but after this outing, even he'd struggle to make a case for that hyphen straddling the two genres.

Gently is the creation of Douglas Adams who was working on another of his cases when he died. This one began with a missing cat and ended with what seemed like the attempted murder of the three attractive leads, Stephen Mangan as Gently, Helen Baxendale and Darren Boyd, who was in the recent Whites with Alan Davies and seems to be cornering the market in sidekicks to curly-headed fools. They all survived but surely the show won't.

The soundtrack twanged with Randall & Hopkirk-esque harpsichord (or did that pair use a spinet?).

The hero chugged around in a Leyland Princess. But Dirk Gently lacked drama, despite blowing all of BBC4's special-effects budget for 2011 on a warehouse explosion, and it lacked comedy with not one halfway funny line - this only making me yearn for the return of Mangan's cFree Agents from last year and scour Amazon for a cheap box-set of Baxendale's Cardiac Arrest, deadly certain laughs of the darkest hue.

Whether you're sick of the sight of Stephen Fry or think his national treasure status is as strong as ever, there's no denying the consistency of QI, which even in its eighth series still has no rival as the quiz show for the discerning viewer. Joining Alan Davies this week are Jimmy Carr, Dara O'Briain (the host of The Apprentice: You're Fired! Wednesdays) and BBC sports presenter Clare Balding.

Five episodes in and this sitcom is starting to get interesting. Roland White - no relation, presumably, to Raymond Blanc - struggles on as head chef in a country house hotel, battling his own delusions and his worryingly insane new employee. Alan Davies in the lead role is remarkably likeable, and the characters are all given room to breathe. Isy Suttie, the stand-up comic and musician best known for her role as Dobby, the object of Mark's affection in Channel 4's Peep Show, gets a good part as the impenetrably stupid waitress Kiki.

Matt King and Oli Lansley's slightly offbeat country kitchen sitcom is up there with Rev as one of the best comedy debuts of the year. Among the main cast - led by Alan Davies's chef Roland - Michelin-starred delights come from Isy Suttie's dippy waitress and Stephen Wight's turn as the menacingly ambitious (and weird) trainee chef Skoose. Tonight, Roland breaks the heart of his long-suffering sous chef Bib when he names Skoose as his sous for a TV cooking segment, and Australian comic Mark Little (AKA Joe Mangel from Neighbours) guests.