Alison Graham

Outnumbered is the great, definitive family sitcom, so I have no idea why anybody would bother with Life of Riley, which, apart from its nods to modern family life, could have been made 40 years ago with Wendy Craig in the Caroline Quentin role. Quentin is Maddy Riley (her name is Riley and the title of the series is Life of Riley - do you get it?), a mother who marries and finds herself head of a new brood - her husband's (Neil Dudgeon) children, her own son and a new baby. It's very broad and pantomime-y, with everyone mugging, shrugging and sighing, and it's packed with 'comic' misunderstandings and farce - Quentin even hides under a bed at one point. Life of Riley is innocuous, inoffensive and is just the kind of sitcom that will appeal to ten-year-olds who'll probably enjoy the way the family's knowing kids always get the better of their hapless parents.

It's been Harry Hill's year, with the splendid TV Burp at last receiving the recognition it deserves with two Baftas, a decent, regular time slot (on Saturday nights) and a good long run. The show is so successful that it's been given its own review - which is the usual stew of wry observations and silly clips as Hill looks back at some of 2008's television highlights. It's the perfect Boxing Day pick-me-up if you're feeling just a little bit jaded. And I'm not complaining, but can we have an hour-long review next year, please, ITV? Go on, you know you want to.

Yes, he's an acquired taste. Yes, he looks like he has more teeth than is surely humanly possible, and yes he ca be filthier than a coal house door. But Russell Brand is a master of florid absurdities, which makes him arguably one of the most magnetic performers of his generation.

In this second Ponderland, Brand is voluble, silly, wildly witty and, yes, a bit naughty sometimes. Using as props a clutch of ostensibly dreary archive clips from what looks like the 1970s, Brand weaves tales of madness encompassing an obnoxious child and his bullied, cut-glass parents, a girl who can't stop sneezing with a mum who looks like Radiohead's Thom Yorke and a three-year-old on a motorcycle.

Radio Times Review

Can you hear that sound? It's the final nails being hammered into the coffin of Little Britain with the truly dismal Little Britain USA.

This curious drama with occasional laughs is still struggling to find its feet and its identity, something that isn't helped by its underwritten, shallow and irritating female characters. This isn't really their fault, because they have almost nothing to do except whine, cling or just generally be pointless and annoying.

Poor Sarah Alexander in particular is saddled with a deadly role as Liz, ex-girlfriend of tedious lothario Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). One minute she's quite sane and sensible, the next she's behaving like a halfwit. Things are still being kept together by Marc Warren as Martin, the hopeless cuckold whose desperate attempts to win back the affections of wife Jen (Keeley Hawes) keep hitting the rocks.

Alison Graham Blog Post

For the record, I think Mutual Friends is a strange mixture - it's not quite a drama, but then it's not quite a comedy either and in reaching for that most difficult to achieve TV hybrid, the 'comedy drama', it's ended up being neither one thing nor another.

Mutual Friends at first feels like a hybrid of just about every TV series and film about angst-ridden friends approaching midlife crises, from The Big Chill through Thirtysomething and on to Cold Feet. But, for all its familiarity, it could be a grower, thanks to Marc Warren and Alexander Armstrong as friends pitched into emotional turmoil after the suicide of their best pal.

Warren, who's best known for playing wide boys and sleazebags, shows a real gift for comedy (Mutual Friends is described as, oh dear, a 'comedy drama', which as we all know means it's not much of either). He does a morning-after-a-drunken-night-before scene that's so achingly realistic, complete with a drool-covered sofa, it's hard not to feel dry-mouthed and wretched in sympathy. Mutual Friends is an ensemble piece, also starring Keeley Hawes as Warren's unhappy wife and Sarah Alexander as Armstrong's ex-partner, but it's the comic chemistry between Warren and Armstrong (playing an ageing lothario) that could just turn out to be the best reason for watching.

Television comedies are so difficult to get right, it's little wonder hardly anyone bothers any more. We're given occasional gifts such as Peep Show and The Thick of It, but they are niche - mainstream, studio-based comedies are almost nonexistent. So it's good to see the genial Lab Rats tiptoeing into the comedy wilderness with a funny blend of the surreal and the silly.

Co-written (with Carl Cooper) by its star, Chris Addison (a gifted comic with The Thick of It and a handful of Radio 4 series to his credit), Lab Rats is a playful comedy set in the science labs of St Dunstan's University. The staff are well-meaning idiots who put up Christmas decorations in August just to brighten the place up a bit, with a boss whose entire purpose in life appears to be the pursuit of chocolate. It's cheerfully daft, in an old-fashioned kind of way (ie it isn't politically incisive or satirical) and it prompts a lot of uncomplicated laughs.

Radio Times Blog

Peep Show is wonderful, a model of edgy comedy perfection, with sharply brilliant, misanthropic, literate scripts from writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and perfectly deadpan performances by David Mitchell and Robert Webb].

As we return for the fifth series of this engagingly filthy comedy, Mark (David Mitchell) is getting drunk and maudlin on wedding champagne as his flatmate Jeremy (Robert Webb) urges him to go out on a double-date: Beggars can't be choosers, she's an actual woman.

Mark - remember, this is a man who once based his romantic strategy on the Siege of Stalingrad - arms himself with a copy of the Friends of the British Museum magazine and goes forth again to search for love...

I adore Peep Show and I adore Mark and Jeremy, an amiable pair of misfits trapped in a squalid, mutually destructive friendship. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's script is packed with the kind of quotable funny lines that should be on T-shirts, and Mitchell and Webb are both just marvellous.