Alexander Armstrong

Alexander Armstrong in baby dash

Alexander Armstrong made a quick dash out of the This Morning studio today - when he found out his wife was in labour.

Incredibly, this is the 20th anniversary and the 39th series of the BBC's flagship entertainment programme - the only entertainment programme that is consistently and genuinely entertaining. Paul Merton's unstoppable flow of surreal invention never seems to dry up, while Ian Hislop must be one of the few people on the planet who can appear on television suffering from a burst appendix and still manage to be funny. With an election looming, the big challenge of the new series - according to Richard Wilson, head of comedy at the production company Hat Trick - will be "to take the spectacularly dull things that politicians say and get laughs out of them". The host tonight is Lee Mack, with Alexander Armstrong and Jo Brand booked to appear later in the run.

This much I know: Alexander Armstrong

The comedian and actor, 40, on playing David Cameron in The Trial of Tony Blair, and his more famous father - a village doctor.

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The comedian Alexander Armstrong tells The Telegraph how filthy jokes can be funny - and why Jonathan Ross shouldn't have been forced out of the BBC.

I can't shake off the sense that this show has switched onto cruise control. It's still funny and there are excellent moments, but they come as occasional flashes. There isn't the sense of one belter of a sketch following another. Focusing on the positives, this week we get an inspired 1960s-style safety film that offers a neat solution to the lack of seatbelts in the backs of cars. And there's a new character, too: champagne-quaffing royal correspondent Terry Devlin, who sits in a breakfast news studio with a sweater draped over his shoulders answering questions such as "What would be the prince's state of mind at this time?" with an expertise that turns out to be distinctly limited. Alexander Armstrong's posh/slightly camp Northern Irish accent (if I'm hearing it right) for the character is a tour de force. Elsewhere, the Spitfire pilots have discovered that there's a spy in the ranks ("The group captain's well vex"). And the businessman who strides through the office taking on-the-hoof briefings learns "Beetroot's making a comeback" and "Nobody misses Sodastream". Plus, look out for a cameo from Dermot Murnaghan.

Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller's comedy sketch show features the sort of quotably amusing characters that made Little Britain such a success. The street-slang-talking Second World War pilots, in particular, may well be remembered in the same breath as Little Britain's entertainingly verbose Vicky Pollard or Catherine Tate's snappy "Am I bovvered?" schoolgirl in years to come. In tonight's episode, the pilots are aggrieved that one of their "homeboys" has been talking behind their backs ("Oh my days, that's like, er, so two-faced"). Other highlights include Divorced Dad giving his son some frank - and rather crude - sex advice, and Terry Devlin, the Ulsterman Royal Correspondent, talking about the intricacies of the Royal Family's lives.

Chalkie Von Schmidt? A spy?! Theres some awfully bad news for the RAF pilots this week in another bunch of very likeable sketches from Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong. A great old running gag makes a welcome return and a new character is introduced.

Its a royal correspondent who knows absolutely nothing about what the royals might be doing, eating or thinking but is nevertheless very happy to appear on rolling news channels and speculate about what he doesnt know at great length. It would be nice to see the pair introduce even more new characters like this one to keep things fresh.

Jilted Jim (the loser dumped on his wedding day for the DJ) pops up again tonight and the happy honeymooners probably arent the only ones groaning now every time they see his face.

Other bright spots include a warning about the danger of wearing T-shirts with writing on them. Meanwhile, the Neanderthals name a baby and we're reminded what a very dangerous decade the 1970s must have been by way of another terrifying Safety First film.

Accident-prone art historian Dennis Lincoln-Park is in trouble again. Tonight, he introduces us to an "absolutely priceless" pen-and-ink drawing by Rembrandt. We know from the word go it's doomed, though it's still childishly funny when the inevitable happens. It's typical of Ben Miller that even when the scripts aren't classics, he lifts the material by his sheer comic energy. That's the case with his embittered solo honeymooner who tells anyone who'll listen about how his bride ran off with the DJ. Similarly, his car showroom customer who insists on acting out what might happen in the vehicle if he bought it ends up a surreal tour de force. Elsewhere, there are enjoyable spoofs on The Krypton Factor and the Olympic logo design, and Alexander Armstrong's RAF pilot has had a letter that makes him depressed: "Like with issues around self-esteem issues, you know?"

John Cleese once said that it was harder to be funny than to be clever. The Cambridge-educated Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller obviously decided to take the high road and go for funny in the second series of The Armstrong and Miller Show.

Their sketches have no point or satirical edge to them. Teachers doing acrobatics while their pupils' backs are turned during an exam, an accident-prone art presenter, even their famous street-talking RAF men have nothing to say. Yet most of the stuff - barring a terrible Star Trek sketch that could have come out of Morecambe and Wise - works. The Blue Peter presenters apologising in child-speak for their off-air decadences may even turn into a classic.

The performances are meticulous. Particularly to be savoured on Friday was Armstrong's tactical use of accents: the northern Blue Peter man's pronunciation of "film" with an extra couple of Ls in it, and the info-commercial guy's voice suddenly dropping a few social classes when it came to saying "three tharsand peounds". There is cleverness here, but it is in the detail.

The Armstrong & Miller Show is one of the best sketch-comedy series since The Fast Show. Since we're on the subject of class, this is probably because Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller are relatively posh. They are the heirs of Monty Python - via A Bit of Fry & Laurie - in that the core comedy involves authority figures behaving in a way you don't expect. Armstrong and Miller make good authority figures. They are best known as the RAF pilots who speak in modern youth patois. In the first sketch of the new series, the pilots face the firing squad: "No way, blood. I's asthmatic. I could actually die." Jokes about the class system and authority figures ought to be baffling to a modern audience. The 1960s were supposed to sweep all that away. Yet here we are, 40 years later, still trying to make sense of it all. Makes you think, blood, innit?