Alison Graham

I love this series and I love Mum and Dad Goodman (Tamsin Greig and Paul Ritter). When the "bambinos" turn up for dinner on this particular Friday night, dad - mildly deaf and obsessed with his aged copies of New Scientist - emerges from the garage clad in a vest, shorts and cut-off wellies. "Why are you dressed like that like a sex attacker?" wonders Adam (Simon Bird). What follows is the usual collision of family in-jokes, misunderstandings and general silliness. Dad has been ordered by mum to burn his beloved magazines, but he's mapped out a ruse designed to pull the wool over her eyes. Meanwhile Aunty Val (Tracy-Ann Oberman) is on her way round to show off her mother-of-the-bride dress. I am delighted to admit that I laughed immoderately all the way through; at the gag about the mobile stuck on speakerphone; at neighbour Jim (super-twitchy Mark Heap) and his supernatural fear of his perfectly timid dog. And at dad's Join The Dots Sex Book. Don't miss.

Another Friday night, and another borderline gruesome family dinner with the Goodmans. The hapless, girl-shy Adam (Simon Bird) faces yet another painful interrogation about "females", or girlfriends, from Dad (the magnificently weird Paul Ritter): "Don't call them females" Adam whines, "they're not corpses." Tonight batty granny visits and upsets Mum (Tamsin Greig), who's already feeling generally unappreciated, by dissing her new curtains. But the most sublimely stupid bit of the episode involves barmy neighbour Jim (Mark Heap) and his dog. This superb beast does the best drunk-acting I have ever seen on television when Jim takes him to the local pub, a ghastly hole called the Black Boy. Dogs shouldn't drink beer. Really, they shouldn't.

It's party conference season and hapless Secretary of State of Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray is in Eastbourne with her team of self-serving apparatchiks, as the repeats of series three of Armando Iannucci's satire continue on Gold. Yet again, watching is like being caught in a firestorm of expletives and deliriously offensive jokes. It's a relentlessly testosterone-charged world - Nicola Murray even remarks at one point, "It's like being trapped in a boys' toilet" - packed with macho posturing from egomaniacal men behaving like competitive baboons. And it's brilliant. Look out for the memorable scene where Malcolm Tucker gets physical with a misguidedly assertive Glenn.

Friday Night Dinner is turning into a tiny treasure. It's not an eventful sitcom but my, it's a funny one, with streams of uncomplicated laughs. There's a scene in a car with a VERY LOUD stereo that left me helpless; I watched it three times before I had to be dragged away and sedated. Writer Robert Popper has nailed the in-jokes, the petty embarrassments and routine bits of silliness that make family life fun, and not in a broad, pantomime-hapless My Family kind of way. Friday Night Dinner is full of surprises and the cast work together seamlessly; Tamsin Greig as a good-hearted, slightly ditzy mum, Paul Ritter as a well-meaning, barmy dad and Simon Bird (yes, Will from The Inbetweeners) and Tom Rosenthal as their grown-up but daft sons. It's endearing, too; everyone loves each other, which is why they are so comfortable with embarrassments. Well, most embarrassments. Adam (Bird) isn't too keen on being quizzed in the downstairs loo by his dad about "females" (ie girlfriends). "Do you have to call them females? You're not a policeman."

What a rarity: a sitcom that isn't black-hearted, cruel, vituperative, mean-spirited or blushingly filthy. Friday Night Comedy is rather sweet, which might sound like the kiss of death for a comedy, but luckily it's funny, too. Not gut-bustingly funny, but enough to make you want to return. Writer Robert Popper (he also acts, produces and is a prank phone-caller of considerable renown) has adapted his own early family life to bring us the Goodmans; mum, dad and two grown-up kids, who all gather round the dinner table every Friday night. Mum (splendid Tamsin Greig) is sweetly daffy and obsessed by MasterChef, while dad (Paul Ritter) is a bit bonkers, and has a bizarre obsession with his yellowing collection of ancient New Scientist magazines. It's all a bit Mike Leigh, only funnier.

Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is back in a blizzard of vituperation as Gold repeats series three of Armando Iannucci's peerless political satire. Tucker is doling out his "verbal colonics" to a new Secretary of State (splendid Rebecca Front, in a role that won her a Bafta). The inventive expletives bounce off the walls in firework displays of pure filth and bad taste. The dexterousness of the insults remains a marvel, as does the sublime supporting cast - Chris Addison and James Smith - of useless apparatchiks.

As Dick Dale's Misirlou bursts on to the soundtrack, idiotic twosome Shane and Kelly embark on what we are led to believe is a Pulp Fiction-type crime spree. The dense duo kidnap a woman as she works in the vast front garden of her posh house, and keep her prisoner in a Maguire family bedroom. Though none of this is what it seems, as soon becomes painfully clear, particularly when balloon-brained Shane has to act the tough guy. The Chatsworth estate is rapidly crawling with police officers, as the missing woman has some very important connections, and the episode descends into elaborate farce. Meanwhile, at the floundering local shop, sensible Sita becomes suspicious of Chesney's "driving school" for young Muslim women, and she makes a disturbing discovery. It's pretty much a typical Shameless week, with something to offend everybody.

Ruth Jones is mesmerising as Hattie Jacques, the beloved comic actor and Carry On star, who became part of a domestic ménage with her adored husband John Le Mesurier and a sexy younger man, John Schofield. The story is irresistible: Schofield (played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) is a second-hand car dealer who meets Hattie after a charity event while she's filming Carry On Cabbie and the two are quickly in the grip of an electrifying sexual passion. Bizarrely, even incredibly, Schofield moves into the Le Mesurier family home and the marital bed, with John Le Mesurier banished to the lodger's room in the attic. Yet Stephen Russell's script judges no one as it reveals a marriage that, in its own strange way, was rock-solid: Hattie and Le Mesurier shared a lifelong devotion after their divorce. Ever the gentleman, Le Mesurier (Robert Bathurst) takes the blame for the break-up. Hattie is a touching drama that, for once, doesn't perform a hatchet job on an adored British comedy figure.

It's Carl Gallagher's 21st birthday and, as he strolls through the Chatsworth Estate, all cocky and confident while Muse belts out Feeling Good on the soundtrack, it seems as if nothing can cloud his horizons. He even has time to strip off his shirt to clean a car, to the delight of an audience of two - one male, one female - entranced by his obvious, ahem, charms. But when he becomes involved in shady dealings after he begs Jamie Maguire for a job (watch out for a terrifying turn from Paul Kaye as a seedy, violent club-owner), wonders if he'll live to see his 21st-birthday party. Elsewhere, it's an eye-wateringly filthy episode, even by Shameless's standards, as the half-witted, barely closeted Micky becomes enmeshed in a gay chatline, leaving nothing to his customers' - or our - imaginations.

Frank Gallagher is feeling philosophical at the start of a new series of the grubby comedy drama as he quotes "snail-chewer" René Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." But by the end of the episode, the first of five running nightly, we're asking who and, more importantly, where is Frank? It appears he might have been abducted by aliens (there's a cute Close Encounters spoof as he gazes in rapture at his brightly lit mothership, The Jockey pub). As we flash back, Frank (David Threlfall) is preparing to marry nice librarian Libby (Pauline McLynn), a bright, presentable woman who is, for reasons that simply cannot be explained, prepared to hitch her wagon to this singularly revolting specimen of manhood. But the wedding preparations are thrown into disarray when the Gallagher household receives terrible news.