Andrea Mullaney

After the grisly sentiment of Derek, the phrase "heartwarming Channel 4 sitcom" may induce shudders. But hurrah: The Mimic is both endearing and gently funny, Even though it features an impressionist - Terry Mynott, previously in Very Important People, who was discovered via a home-made YouTube clip of him imitating celebrities. Here, he plays Martin, a gormless, shy chap who amuses himself with his voices: Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn debate his problems; Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones keep him company watching TV. The show takes a relaxing low-key approach: a scene where he tricks some teenagers is allowed to play out softly, without overdoing it, and his discovery of a potential grown-up son isn't milked for cheap sappiness (yet). Ironically, the whole thing's rather original.

Sue Perkins has become ubiquitous at the BBC in the last few years, whether eating peculiar period food or learning to conduct orchestras or telling us about Mrs Dickens/Maria Von Trapp or, as co-host of The Great British Bake-Off, making bad puns about buns. Someone, somewhere, has decided we can't get enough of her. You may have your own feelings about this. Well, here she is again, allegedly going back to her comedy roots with her own sitcom, where she plays Sara, a neurotic vet who's about to turn 40 but hasn't yet managed to tell her parents that she's gay.

Despite being kind of annoying, she has supportive friends (including ever-reliable performers Nicola Walker and Joanna Scanlan) and is able to attract hot ladies like Shelley Conn, who is charmed by Sara's rotten patter and way with extracting barbed wire from dogs' paws.

Around 50 per cent of the show is laboured animal slapstick - there is a dead cat which is lugged around to decreasing effect - and the other half is meant to be touching, as Sara wrestles with her inadequacies and her friends urge her to finally come out to her folks. It's an awkward mix. The comedy just isn't that funny and the sentiment isn't that interesting. At times I felt a bit of second-hand embarrassment and - worst of all - the show reminded me of two grim indulgent sitcoms of years past: Baddiel's Syndrome, in which David Baddiel and his mates failed miserably at doing a Seinfeld, and Rhona, in which Rhona Cameron and her mates (including Perkins' double act and Bake-Off partner Mel Giedroyc) failed at doing an Ellen. What they all have in common is that their stars aren't actually actors but stand-ups, and that the other two only lasted one series. There's a lesson there.

Like all PG Wodehouse adaptations, this suffers from the inevitable fact that it can never be as funny as the original, where the humour is not particularly in the ludicrous situations - here devoted pig owner Lord Emsworth strives to help the Empress win the Fattest Pig Contest despite the untimely imprisonment of her keeper. It's the way they're told: sheer effervescent clever wordplay, bubbling along at the perfect pace, with eccentric metaphors and slang words which jump off the page to charm away any reservations (that unfortunate Nazi collaboration business, or the fact they all basically tell the same story over 
and over).

Scriptwriters do try, forcing the best lines in there somehow, but even actors with the skill of Timothy Spall and Robert Bathurst can't make them sound as funny as they read. Spall looks exactly right as the lugubrious, befuddled Emsworth though, with Jennifer Saunders as his bossy sister (straying slightly too far into spoofing it up) and newcomer Jack Farthing as his cheerfully idiotic son. Frothy nonsense is hard to bring off and though I rarely laughed, it is an amiable and harmless distraction from a cold, broke January.

My Mad Fat Diary is both realistic and frothy. Based on the teenage diaries of writer Rae Earl - who, unlike most of us, had something genuinely dramatic to agonise over, having been taken into a psychiatric hospital - it portrays its 1990s heroine (young Scots actress Sharon Rooney) in all her gawky, unglamorous, stroppy non-glory. But this is far from a grim expose of mental health, because Rae is far less interested in that than in boys - or BOYS!!! as her diary would have it.

It's an odd tonal mixture, lurching from touching moments to overegged stereotypes, with plenty that both young and older viewers will groan to recognise. It's all played a bit safe though: I wish they'd let out more of the madness.

The Thick Of It makes a welcome, belated return for what looks to be its final series. The Coalition are now in power and Peter Mannion, introduced in Opposition as an old-school wet Tory with a distaste for modern politics, is now in office, alongside a thrusting young Lib Dem. The civil servants are the same (as, confusingly, is advisor Glenn, who seems to have conveniently switched parties between series). And the fearsome Malcolm Tucker: well, he's out, leaving an anger - and swearing - vacuum.

Tucker and the hapless Nicola Murray reappear in the second episode, but even there he's a muted version of himself and the show seems softer, less scabrous without his manic presence. Which is probably completely deliberate: creator Armando Iannucci seems to have rethought the show's satirical emphasis as well as the new political framework. The politicians on both sides seem almost vulnerable, but so do their advisors, none of them really having any clue about what they're doing anymore.

It's still very, very funny and the cast are all perfectly pitched. Roger Allam, as Mannion, has such delicious comic timing that a simple line about a Twix made me rewind three times just to savour it again. One could quibble with the sheer amount of vituperative nicknames that the characters hurl around at each other - you have the impression that they must all be sitting up at night drafting new ones for the next day - but at least they make sense, unlike their policies.

Sky's A Touch Of Cloth started out so well. Charlie Brooker's spoof of every cop show ever (starring John Hannah as angst-ridden breaks-the-rules DCI Cloth and Suranne Jones as ambiguous love interest and dogmatic DC Anne Oldman) is timely and silly; it initially reminded me of the late Leslie Nielsen's Police Squad in its incessant visual puns and straight-faced double entendres and that is very high praise indeed. But then it went on - and on - and on. Now, the version given to press was a turgid 90 minutes, which has thankfully now been chopped into two parts for consecutive nights. But it's the same story throughout so I think it will still be a joke stretched too far. It's a shame, because at a snappier length, this would be a hoot and a much-needed antidote to our glut of murder.

Darren Boyd is a slightly more effective undercover in Spy, a new Sky1 sitcom whose premise seems lifted from the American series Chuck: they're both about hapless, put-upon guys who work in computer stores and are accidentally recruited by the secret services, thenceforth having to maintain their geeky cover while juggling espionage adventures. Chuck, though, is a glossy action show and Spy is, unfortunately, just the usual underachieving British sitcom which somehow manages to take a talented enough cast and a promising enough premise and yet not deliver any real laughs at all.

Boyd's longsuffering Tim looks slightly irritated throughout, though it doesn't stop several women (including the wasted Rebekah Staton) falling for him, while it's interesting that instead of the usual cute, supportive kid, his nine-year-old son is a horrible little monster out to undermine his dad at any opportunity - interesting, but not actually funny. Still, the show has Robert Lindsay, liberated at last from the shackles of being the one to play the longsuffering dad in My Family, now as a demented, grizzled spy boss and clearly enjoying himself hugely. At least someone is.

So as The Comic Strip has been revived, it makes a certain sense that the result is a decade-mashing melange which tells a warped version of Tony Blair's PM years, taking place in an anachronistic Britain which looks like the 1950s, ripping off The 39 Steps, Sunset Boulevard, The Godfather and, understandably, The Comic Strip themselves. Or rather, Peter Richardson, for though never reaching the same heights as his former colleagues, the director pretty much was The Comic Strip. He's brought back some of the old crew, including Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane, Nigel Planer and John Sessions.

For some, the intentionally over the top nonsense of Blair going on the run from 'Inspector Hutton of Scotland Yard' after faking evidence for the Iraq War - complete with lines like "It felt like the whole world was against me, apart from Barbara Windsor of course" - will not be enough to excuse the spoof from its nastier accusations: Blair's shown murdering John Smith and Robin Cook, while Thatcher (played by Jennifer Saunders, naturally) is a monstrous Norma Desmond luring him to bed.

Yes, this isn't exactly sophisticated satire, but it is surprisingly funny in places, with Stephen Mangan capturing Blair's wide-eyed insouciance. While it references the 50s visually, it actually evokes nostalgia for the 80s, when having a childish pop at the people in power felt dangerous - like it could genuinely change things. And the darkest comic line is a real one: "Hey, in the end, only God and history can judge me," says Tony.

Horrible Histories with Stephen Fry, based on the best-selling books by Terry Deary, has been making youngsters (and a few adults) chuckle for three series quietly on the CBBC channel. Having been the surprise winner of Best Sketch Show in the British Comedy Awards - which, not to put it down, was in part to do with lack of competition - it has been awarded the dubious honour of a promotion to BBC1, with its best bits repackaged with spurious links from Stephen Fry.

The sketches are still good fun, including the ones you might have seen on YouTube already where King Charles II raps and the Vikings do a soft rock number, but the point of Fry is lost on me: he's in a studio half-heartedly decorated with random historical objects basically repeating what the sketches have already told us more amusingly ("No one really knows how much of the story of Troy is true and how much is myth," he intones: well, thanks for that Stephen, otherwise I obviously would have assumed that Menelaus really did greet Helen with "you is well fit, innit?").

It's a bit like those 'adult' editions of the Harry Potter books with different covers for people who didn't want to look as if they were reading a children's book, even though they were.

A welcome return for Limmy's Show, not just the most inventive Scots sketch show for yonks but nationally far superior to the lazy likes of Come Fly With Me or Tramadol Nights. Not all of Brian Limond's ideas work, but even the ones which puzzle are at least interesting and many are hilariously original. I'm particularly pleased to see the naively earnest phone-in adventure game host Falconhoof again, this time with an annoying jester sidekick, while a new TV psychic who looks oddly familiar is a good addition. But it's the funny peculiar elements which really make the show stand out, like Limond's running chats to camera in which he makes great use of his disconcerting stare. It's almost scary (though not as much as Come Fly With Me being recommissioned).