Amol Rajan

Andrea Jenkyns accused HIGNFY of fixing the audience and Ian Hislop's A++ comeback was simply magnificent

Bravo to Ian Hislop and Paul Merton for his little gag at the expense of guest host Amol Rajan which was the icing on the cake.

Amol Rajan accused of getting 'personal' by Tim Minchin

The One Show's stand-in presenter Amol Rajan managed to anger viewers tonight by being rude to a guest. The BBC's media editor clashed with comedian Tim Minchin during the early stages of the programme.

Size has always been central to Ronnie Corbett's fame too - or rather, the lack of it. As if to prove the point, Matt Lucas described him as "a giant" in the introductory sequence of Ronnie Corbett's Comedy Britain. That sequence made this sound like a long and slightly tedious tour of Corbett's lunch companions, with the aim of presenting him as the patron saint of British comedy. In fact, it was utterly wonderful.

Miranda Hart, Stephen Merchant, David Mitchell and John Cleese were among those who shared insights into what makes comedians tick and comedy funny. The former is mainly the potential for going from bladder-wrenching insecurity to megalomania in the blink of an eye. The latter is mainly timing.

Corbett proved a superb and humble interrogator. He didn't address the decline of the sitcom and the relative rise of sketch shows, nor did he ask why so many comedies these days centre on flocks of people, rather than families, and what that says about our society. But he did remind us that contemporary British comedy is full of great talent, a useful corrective to the nostalgic defeatism of most televisual trips down memory lane.

A species of comedy has lately triumphed on the stage and on Channel 4, PhoneShop celebrates the mediocrity of middle-class life. Think Michael McIntyre. There is nothing greatly wrong about this, and much moderately right. In this sitcom, for example, there were some hilarious moments as another crack squad went to work with a new recruit. They all wear drab suits and the gag lies in their realisation of just how mundane their life is. It's like Tim from The Office, but stretched into a whole cast.

What didn't work, alas, were the accents. The manager talks in a soulless Slough accent, but two of the central characters riff in possibly the most unconvincing roodboy patois Channel 4 has yet been blessed with. This was a shame, because these actors could really act; they'd simply been told to deliver their lines in a "street" manner. It ended up sounding like Ali G, without the attendant bling to tell you this was a joke. For all that, this comedy aimed to capture the tedium of many modern working lives, and did so well.

Devotees of this show, which used to be awful and is now rather addictive, will know that Gaz (played by Will Mellor) is now in a wheelchair.

Just as in Byker Grove many years ago, when PJ and Duncan, later and less enjoyably known as Ant and Dec, went from being joyful youngsters to morbid goons after the paintball accident that blinded PJ, so sitcoms are harder to pull off when the main character is paralysed. Laughter feels wrong. Send for a secret millionaire, I kept thinking to myself, and undo this injustice.

Last Night's TV - The Story of Variety, BBC4

Nostalgia is for losers, but it often makes great telly." So began my last contribution to this page, reviewing the Imagine take on Ray Davies. Forgive me for returning to it. I know it's not the done thing to copy and paste from one's own work, but we're so much in the same territory with The Story of Variety that not doing so would be dim. And for the avoidance of doubt, here was Michael Grade, three minutes in, describing his project as a survey of a "lost world... [that is] gone but isn't quite forgotten".

He [Jeremy Beadle] spent decades branded as serviceably absurd, but entertaining nevertheless. He was the original prankster, the master of the practical joke that brought 15 minutes of fame to nobodies. With his eternal quiff, stupid beard, rubber features and instinctive jocularity, his place in the national consciousness, harnessed over four decades, was owed to his being a peerless figure of fun. Angela Carter said comedy is tragedy that happens to other people, and by making himself the centre of attention - by inviting people to laugh at him and not simply with him - Beadle took the jokes, and the tragedy, upon himself.

What was marvellous about The Unforgettable... Jeremy Beadle was that it sensitively conveyed the rather sad point that this man was, of his own volition, completely misunderstood. There is a form of television comedy, whose vanguard he was in, where the comic plays the buffoon and invites his audience to come down to a level where all is absurd and frivolous. Beadle, especially the Beadle of You've Been Framed in later years, seemed just this, a kind of merry mountebank with limited intelligence. In fact, he was just the opposite.

Did you know that he raised over £100m for charity - more, as his friend Chris Tarrant put it, than probably every other television entertainer of his generation? Or that he was born in the post-war East End to a single mother, his father having abandoned her upon mention of pregnancy? Or that he was born with Poland Syndrome, which caused webbing on his right hand, and that he dropped out of school despite being ferociously intelligent? Or even that in his long-haired twenties he was better looking than most rock stars?

He was part of the brilliant brigade that ran Time Out in its early days and, when launching its edition in Manchester, organised rock concerts on the hoof, whereupon he'd ring up friends and nonchalantly declare that the Grateful Dead were headlining. Stints on LBC radio followed before his television breakthrough. By the time he peaked with Beadle's About, he owed his career chiefly to his extraordinary ability to play dumb - which, in retrospect, required a hell of a brain. And yet, as this show proved, it was convincing, so that the last laugh was his, and the real joke on us.

One of the more useful dichotomies of the age must be the brilliance of BBC4 and the tawdriness of BBC3, the best and worst of television respectively. I had thought Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps was the worst show on television, but it may be surpassed by Mouth to Mouth, of which there was a double bill. This show feature several decent actors reading an appalling script, which they relate directly to the camera (making you, the viewer, the second mouth - it's mouth to mouth, geddit?). In episode three last night, our hero revealed the trauma of being a lower-middle-class man negotiating episodes of football and erectile dysfunction. We had snapshot messages from friends of his, all of whom are afflicted with similarly vacuous dilemmas. It was like the film Human Traffic minus the clever observations. How on earth this sort of television can be defended, in the interest of promoting new talent, or advancing the cause of British scriptwriting and comedy, I will never know.