Alison Graham

Sherlock Holmes himself, Benedict Cumberbatch, is the first guest host at the start of the 40th series of the much-loved comedy current affairs panel show. Here's hoping he has the right mix of affability and keen-wittedness that a good host needs, otherwise he'll be wrapped up like a Maypole by team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. The show is recorded the night before transmission, so there is little that we can say, apart from doling out a few nuggets for fact-fans. Such as, did you know this is the 138th show hosted by a guest presenter in the eight years since Angus Deayton left in October 2002? No, thought not.

According to the press blurb, I said at the launch of the last series of TV Burp: "Suddenly, all is right with the world, because Harry Hill's TV Burp is back. Witty, funny, surreal and silly, it's what Saturday nights are for." I might as well repeat it, because nothing's changed. For some of us the year is divided into halves - when Burp is on the telly and when it isn't. So our darkening evenings are just that little bit brighter now that Hill is back with his rich and warming stew of the recondite and the nonsensical culled from his hours and hours of TV watching.

Michael McIntyre's perpetual effervescence fizzes in Blackpool, a town ripe with potential for gags about fags, chips and people with funny accents wearing fleeces. McIntyre also has some sport with members of the Blackpool football team, who are in the audience. The headline act is a hectoring John Bishop, whose coarse schtick about stag dos, hen nights and sex toys is an acquired taste. Much more interesting is Miles Jupp - who was so good in the BBC2 sitcom Rev - mining his background. "I'm privileged, not just to be here, but in general." Elsewhere, the unsettling Terry Alderton, with a strange, tangential but often winning act, has fun with body-popping cockneys, while Justin Moorhouse is rude about fat people.

McIntyre leaps on to the stage as he always does, as if he's bouncing on an invisible pogo stick, to entrance the audience at Sunderland's Empire Theatre with a routine about murderer Raoul Moat. Risky, or so you would think, as it's surely all still a bit too raw and close to home. But this is McIntyre, so it isn't monstrously tasteless. Rather, he has fun with former soccer star Paul Gascoigne's bizarre walk-on part in the drama, when he turned up at Moat's denouement clutching sandwiches and a fishing rod. Perhaps other North East personalities should have done the same, ponders McIntyre, and arrived at the crime scene clutching snacks and pastimes. It works, once you've allowed yourself an initial, sharp intake of breath. It's a good bill, headlined by the rather sweet Sarah Millican, with her self-deprecation and observations about bras and dress-sizes.

Tonight one of QI's infrequent female panellists, Sue Perkins, fresh from dusting the flour off her dainty hands in The Great British Bake Off, joins the boys. She's sparky and funny and will be more than capable of holding her own with those noisy, competitive lads. They are, of course, question master Stephen Fry and genial regular Alan Davies, here with Gyles Brandreth (so garrulous he never knowingly uses two words when he can use 20) and frequent panellist Bill Bailey, who is always good value as he dallies with the esoteric, the surreal and the downright daft.

Michael McIntyre bounds on stage, newly svelte and very natty in a purple suit. He doesn't look like the most polarising figure in British comedy. Polarising in the sense that mass audiences adore him, while other, less successful comics marinate in resentment whenever his name is mentioned. Fine, yes, McIntyre is very safe (though he says "s**t" twice, to my horror - it's like hearing your favourite auntie swear), but the observational stuff is fun. It may be obvious, but there you go, that's observation for you. Anyway, I like him, and the Glasgow audience at the first of a new run of Roadshows is in his pocket immediately as he tells cute stories about his two small children, revolving doors at airports and trampolines in gardens. None of it will start any revolutions, but who needs that on a Saturday night? He's not Bill Hicks. McIntyre is wildly enthusiastic about the night's acts, including local boy Kevin Bridges, garrulous Canadian Craig Campbell and Radio 4 favourite Milton Jones, whose punning, literal schtick makes my teeth itch with annoyance.

Stephen Fry fans, prepare to hug yourselves with glee - RT's cover star is going to be everywhere this autumn and winter. The second, eagerly anticipated volume of his memoirs, The Fry Chronicles, is published this week (it's been too long since Moab Is My Washpot in 1997), he's doing gigs at the Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere and, of course, he's hosting this new series of QI. At last! We no longer have to survive on endless re-runs on Dave, so endless that we devotees know all the questions and all the correct answers and aren't caught out by the klaxon any more. So let's welcome the newness. As always, expect an erudite, if occasionally unnecessarily smutty delight, as we reach the letter "H". Genial perpetual QI loser Alan Davies returns, along with another regular, the cheery Phill Jupitus. Making up the quartet are the dolorous Jack Dee and Geordie comic Ross Noble, wild of hair and even wilder of imagination.

As series three began, Little Britain had become huge; the air was thick with its catchphrases ("I'm a laydee", "I'm the only gay in the village") and the transfer of Matt Lucas and David Walliams's sketch show from BBC2 to BBC1 guaranteed a whole new, bigger audience. But then the arguments began: was it cutting edge, or just coarse? Some viewers didn't see the funny side of new characters such as Mrs Emery, an incontinent old lady. Make up your own minds as BBC3 starts a re-run. All the old favourites are here, from monstrous Marjorie Dawes to Vicky "yeah but, no but" Pollard.

Notionally a sitcom, this series defies easy categorisation. It's not funny, though its portrait of a comfortably long marriage may provoke the odd smile of recognition, and it's not particularly substantial. It is, though, rather sweet. Alfred Molina and Dawn French are Roger and Val, a devoted, mildly chaotic couple whose complete familiarity with each other's personality tics and traits means they're happily at ease as they chat about the day's events. Nothing happens. The first episode centres on Val's determination to find the guarantee for a broken vacuum cleaner, which leads them both to reminisce as they sort through the accretions of married life - the aged bills, bank statements and holiday souvenirs. As they do so, we glimpse snippets of their personalities. Roger is a febrile, nervy pedant, while Val is a worrier. They both want to rebel, even in tiny ways, but they can't summon the energy. Molina and French make it work; in lesser hands it would just fizzle away.

Rev is such a good-hearted, sweet-natured comedy, it feels churlish to wish that it could, somehow, be better. Tom Hollander is a pocket-sized delight as the well-meaning inner-city vicar Adam Smallbone, but the scripts don't give him enough to work with. As a result, Rev is too mild and lacking in comedy backbone. There are still incidental pleasures though, like Nigel the hand-wringingly earnest curate. Hugh Bonneville is good value, too, as an insufferable media-whore of a vicar who prompts a riled Adam to decide that he should have a media career of his own. He starts by posing for cheesy publicity pictures ("Do I look authoritarian but dashing?") and ends with a disastrous appearance on The One Show.