Alexi Duggins

Fans of middling supermarket-based sitcoms, fear not. Once again you can get your fill of shelf stacking-based mishaps as this northern comedy from the production company behind The IT Crowd and The Office returns. Gasp! - at the exquisite tension over the long-term future of the shop's ability to provide cut-to-order chunks of meat... Weep! - over the poignant human struggle to open a jammed pair of sliding doors... Yawn! - as a cheap visual gag is shoe-horned in which involves a leaving video for the store manager and a porn vid... Still, what the show lacks in plotting and script, it more than makes up for in terms of performances. A cast led by Jane Horrocks and Stephanie Beacham does such sterling work that it somehow renders this average, rather than tedious.

TV Burp might have won Harry Hill a Bafta, but it was his 1997 C4 show that first won him a place in the nation's hearts. Here, we get a retrospective on the programme's three series via the medium of a clips show but, with it being penned and directed by Hill, it's delivered via the medium of a surreal mockumentary that uses past footage to justify oddball storylines. Blurry shots of Hill clutching tins of Sild are overlaid with the claim that 'Harry was off his face on oily fish'. Skits of a pretend Welsh-language soap opera featuring Hill babbling gobbledegook prompt a storyline about miners marching on the C4 building. Clips of THHS regular Burt Kwouk yelling lines like 'Hey Harry, this show doesn't get any funner, does it?' wind up providing the peg for a story about the cast falling out so badly that Hill ends up beating the actor who played his little brother with a stick ('but it was a small stick!'). Very, very strange, but also very, very charming.

Good ol' Sharon Horgan. She so rarely puts a foot wrong that it's a wonder she isn't representing Great Britain in the Olympics balance beam event. Nothing changes as we reach the third episode of Dead Boss, where she continues to ring up the laughs with a performance alternates between flustered, histrionic and deadpan. Tonight, Horgan's character, Helen, is lumbered with a new cellmate as part of a prison exchange with Germany: Gertrude (Anna Crilly), 'a 46-year-old widowed cannibal'. Helen's charged with the task of going to 'show her where she can get a souvenir tattoo done - that sort of thing' by the warden. Helen can't fail unless she wants her legal aid application quashed. Sounds hackneyed. Actually, it's anything but. Very funny.

Contrition is all well and good, but why bother when you can bribe someone with a sports car instead? Such is Matt LeBlanc's approach to appeasing Sean after sleeping with his wife: offering him a pimp-mobile, while demonstrating his failure to really learn his lesson by escalating his dalliance with his boss's spouse. Meanwhile, Pucks! suffers a ratings slide between the first and second episodes, prompting a mini panic behind the scenes. There are some nice, understated comic touches tonight: the camera sweeps over the collection of Friends figurines that LeBlanc keeps by his bed, and an argument about the comic value of pauses in dialogue is shot through with chucklesome reaction shots. Is this show finally on track to become more than the sum of its parts?

Since James Corden pissed his claim to be a talented comic writer up the wall with Horne & Corden, it's easy to give all the credit for Gavin & Stacey to Ruth Jones. But although she created and wrote this tale of a single mum in small-town Wales - and the geographical parallels are obvious - Stella is far more comedy drama than sitcom. Gavin... was played largely for laughs with the heartwarming stuff as a backdrop, but here the laughter is secondary to the emphasis on Jones's relationships with her ex, her kids and the barren wasteland of her sex life. Jones puts in a predictably impeccable performance but - on the evidence of this first episode - this doesn't sparkle as much as you might have hoped. The jury's out for now.

Lets make no bones about it: given their League of Gentlemen track record, this series has been an average outing for Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. With the exception of last week's dark, twisty hilarity (something to do with the return of Royston Vasey cohort Mark Gatiss?) Psychoville has continued to display the League's knack of elevating even the most banal, infantile subject matter to the status of high drama, but fared poorly on the laugh count.

There's still a few chuckles to be had: tonight, largely residing in the continued bidding war for Mr Snappy, and his owner's odd obsession with Crabtree's bodily functions. Mr Jelly also appears to be embarking on a satisying journey to redemption through a reconciliation with Mr Jolly, so fingers crossed for this narrative. But be warned: the eagle-eyed will have noticed that the actress who wound up swinging upside down in David's 'bad murder' was Natalie Cassidy. Which suggests plenty of footage of Sonia from Eastenders next week. Unlikely to be a good thing.

Time Out Review

Jigging energetically around the stage, firing off volleys of falsetto observations and faux-aristocratic impressions, he's like an energetic Frankie Howerd in a Worzel Gummidge wig, sending up video footage of acne-scarred teens playing retro computer game 'Track & Field', while lamenting the use of fear as an educational tool for children.