Alexander Armstrong

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?

A decade after a BBC producer told them they were too posh to have their own television show, Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller return with another series and a handful of favourite characters from series one. Coming back are the RAF airmen who use the language of modern-day teenagers in upper-class accents; this week they're up against a firing squad and seemingly incapable of seeing the gravity of their situation. New to the scene are three presenters of a Blue Peter-style programme apologising to their audience of children for drunken scandals. It makes for fairly traditional, but very funny, sketch show material.

The word is that 2009 may prove the year Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong finally hit the big time. They've been on the TV map for over a decade now (their first show began life on the Paramount Comedy channel in 1997) but acclaim for their first BBC One sketch series two years ago means that a head of steam has gathered behind this, their second BBC outing. The old favourites of the previous series return - such as the Second World War pilots who speak with upper-class accents but use modern street slang. Among the new characters are the excellent Dennis Lincoln Park, an accident-prone historian, and a teacher who finds inventive ways to amuse himself while invigilating high school exams.

Check out the logo for the lads' new production company as the credits roll tonight. Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong are embracing their inner toff, with their own Toff Media, and fittingly, that logo isn't even a logo - it's a rather saucy coat of arms.

It's in honour of a nameless BBC exec who once told them they were too posh to have their own show - and didn't anticipate that their ever-so-posh Second World War pilots who talk like urban rappers might turn out a bit of a hit.

Other regular characters back for series two include the posh well-informed Prime Minister, their very posh and very rude Flanders and Swann-style musical duo, and the not-so-posh Neanderthals.

But the funniest sketches tonight see them playing children's TV presenters, forced to explain to their young viewers about why their naughty behaviour has been splashed all over the tabloids yet again. "We wanted to cheer Jason up, so we took him to a special dancing club... to watch some dancing..."

It's fun to see a sketch show so deeply rooted in Britishness and tonight Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller fly the flag nicely. The posh World War II pilots who are fluent in modern-day teenage slang make their usual welcome appearance, this time facing a firing squad ('we never done nuthin'/'I need my inhalaaar!'), plus the duo try to explain away drunken and drug-fuelled exploits in the manner of Blue Peter presenters. The highlight, though, is the accident claims advert for people who have had an accident reconstructing accidents for accident claims adverts. Mad, but brilliant.

Micro Men was a light-hearted, cleverly realised and wholly entertaining exercise in techno-nostalgia about the battle for dominance of the British home computer market of the eighties.

In one corner Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong), the maverick and tempestuously bad-tempered inventor, in the other, his ex-employee Christopher Curry (Martin Freeman), founder of Acorn computers. Their bitter rivalry culminated in an actual pub brawl, lovingly recreated in the film.

All good fun, but what was going on with Armstrong's make-up? It was terribly distracting. Someone needs to invent a bald wig that doesn't look like a flesh-tone swimming cap.

More mad, bad-hair acting was available in Micro Men, a faction drama based on the competition between Clive Sinclair and someone who wasn't Clive Sinclair but was very similar. Both of them made crap computers that weren't anything like as good as American ones or Korean ones or Malaysian ones. They finally went bust and were sold to Alan Sugar.

The initial problem with this drama was that soldering as a central activity really isn't very dramatic, though marginally more exciting than men who solder. While factually based on the cut-throat race to be the first official computer to be put in schools, the plot wasn't quite as nail-biting as it sounds. The producers obviously gleaned that the dullness of their contestants might be a stumbling block, so they cast a pair of comics, Alexander Armstrong as Sinclair and Martin Freeman as not-Sinclair. They did what comics invariably do in dramas: they stopped being funny. A comic who's not being funny is like a rubber tin-opener.

All was not lost, though. Riding to the rescue was Armstrong's wig, a thing of radiant, relentless hilarity. Imagine one of those "hey you, Jimmy" Scottish tam-o'-shanters, available from joke shops, with the orange hair attached. Now imagine it without the hat. There was just a shiny, bald, plastic pate with a marmalade nylon fringe. It gave an award-winning performance. When the hair was on screen, you couldn't take your eyes off it. Neither could the rest of the cast. They watched Armstrong's head with fascination. What would it do next? Well, we know what it did next. It invented the C5 and had affairs with ridiculously young girls, revealing a great and comforting truth that there is no dumb idiot like a really clever dumb idiot.

In a week when we had both the best and the worst dramas of 2009, the third big show of the week, Micro Men, was as simple and restorative a pleasure as a cup of hot Heinz Tomato Soup, taken in a favourite armchair. With snuggle-socks on.

The most important thing was how committed everyone - director, screenwriter, actors - was to the idea that Clive Sinclair is inherently funny. And it's not a premise that you can argue too vociferously against. Played by Alexander Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller - who showed every evidence of walking on to the set every day shouting "My job is brilliant, and I am having the time of my life!" - Sinclair threw things through windows, dropped and did press-ups during meetings while dressed in a Jimmy Savile-esque tracksuit, and shouted "Bloody bugger!" a lot in his strangled, ginger voice.

The Eighties nostalgia-porn - Manic Miner, perms, Trimphones with curly leads and dials that go "wudder wudder wudder" - was full-on but never stupid, and the script used the battle of party-time Sinclair versus the goody two-shoes BBC Acorn as a winning example of that much-maligned genre, comedy-drama. It peaked with a single shot of an underpass, in Cambridge, at night. The chief executive of Acorn is walking in the road ... when he is nearly run over by Sinclair in a prototype C5.

"Get on the pavement, with the other pedestrians," Sinclair hisses, camply, before accelerating, painfully slowly, away.