Andrea Mullaney

TV review: How TV Ruined Your Life

Charlie Brooker has become the TV that he used to warn us about. When your whole screen and print persona depends on being the outsider, the transition to being on the inside is a tricky one.

TV review: Being Ronnie Corbett

As well as being interviewed about their admiration, some of his younger fans were filmed chatting awkwardly with him, standing around in an empty white space, which suggested the waiting room of a comedy afterlife (or perhaps a paradigm for conjugating visual epigrams). Maybe the budget couldn't even run to the scruffy old chairs of his trademark monologues.

Running nightly this week are this year's seasonal shorts little crackers from Sky One, which annually tries to make up for the dearth of decent original drama and comedy from January-November by gorging us with a festive selection box featuring some of the best-known names in the business.

This time they've got the likes of Victoria Wood, Catherine Tate, Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke, Julian Barratt, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey - oh, the list goes on, basically anyone who's ever appeared on a panel game is either appearing in, writing or directing one of these 12-minute films, mostly based on autobiographical stories about their childhoods.

And like a selection box, there are a few yucky praline noisette ones. David Baddiel's film is as annoying as he is, though it does feature a good impersonation of Record Breakers star Norris McWhirter by Alastair McGowan, who must have been delighted to get a chance to do an impression he probably last did as a child. Chris O'Dowd has a dull grumpy Santa story and Dawn French oddly casts herself as the late Queen Mother.

But there are some nice strawberry cream ones too: Victoria Wood's is a sweet, nostalgic tale, Julian Barratt's teenaged heavy metallers are quirky and Kathy Burke's memory of meeting Joe Strummer is endearing. Anyway, they're all over so quickly that even the ho-hum ones are watchable enough - shame though that for Sky, decent original programmes come barely more than once a year.

On paper, The Trip sounds bloody awful: a cosy, luvvie giant in-joke for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, showing off their impressions and them eating ridiculously fancy meals. So why is it so completely brilliant? "It's not about the destination, it's the journey," as 'Steve' described his refusal to use satnav, but referring also, surely, to the incidental banter and bickering between them which is gradually revealing their true selves. Or 'true selves'.

And it's also hilarious: their Michael Caine-off, "we rise at dawn-ish" and last night's ABBA duet may soon replace Alan Partridge's most quotable lines as the things fans greet Steve Coogan with. Which will be some small compensation for him still not being able to do Rob's "I'm a small man in a box" voice.

Fans of gentle 1960s-set village comedy dramas must have been gutted when Heartbeat was cancelled recently. But lucky them, it's back, in daytime form, under the name The Indian Doctor. True, it's about a GP, not a policeman, arriving in a small Welsh town where classic pop songs soundtrack every plot development. And there's a racial twist, as the hero is Sanjeev Bhaskar's Dr Prem Sharma, fresh from Delhi with his glamorous wife Kamini, part of the influx of Indian doctors recruited by health minister Enoch Powell to staff the NHS.

The locals are completely ignorant about Indians - they're even shown a special information film to brief them on their new neighbour, followed by a screening of The Millionairess, the dodgy film in which Peter Sellers pretends to be Indian and sings Goodness Gracious Me, a nod to the title of Bhaskar's breakthrough sketch show.

But while this might sound on paper like the basis for a gritty drama about racism and immigration, it's been made as a cheerful afternoon wallow in the lighter side of culture clash. Pretty much everyone is well-meaning, apart from designated villain Mark Williams, playing the moustache-twirling Coal Board boss and his snobby wife. They invite the Sharmas to a dinner party, complete with tasteless Vesta Curry from a box to make them feel at home, thinking that they're doing the poor rubes a big favour - only to find that Mrs S is from an aristocratic Indian family, more used to mixing with the Mountbattens.

Meanwhile, the rest of the town are friendly and the one family who are a little unsure about having an Indian doctor are quickly won over when he comes through in an emergency, so that's all right then. Still, perhaps that's fair enough - not every immigrant to Britain suffered racism, particularly in 1963 when the country was crying out for them, and it would be a shame if every fictional account was full of unpleasantness, as if - in the long run - people didn't manage mostly to settle in perfectly well. And this isn't heavyweight drama, just a watchable and mildly amusing enough nostalgic little series.

Miranda is here for those who miss 1970s slapstick and shows like Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Miranda Hart's namesake character is a Francesca Spencer, prone to falling over, having her dress pulled off by a departing taxi, getting stuck on a sushi carousel and getting into embarrassing misunderstandings. It's kind of like the spoof "Hennimore" sitcom from That Mitchell And Webb Look, where the joke is that you know exactly what joke is coming up.

Done straight it would be terrible, but Hart's blithe honesty that it's all just a silly sitcom, complete with cast members waving bye-bye at the end, is disarming.

After bringing us up to speed on the events of the last series, she happily declares: "Right, let's jolly on with the show," and the whole thing's like a community panto, where you know the routines are all ancient but you giggle along a bit anyway, mostly because everyone involved seems to be having so much fun.

Patricia Hodge, her snooty mum, has a good catchphrase: she's always saying of some ordinary activity, "it's what I call ..." then using the same word that everyone else uses, like "a walk". It could, as I call it, "catch on".

TV review: Reggie Perrin

This limp, traditional effort just seems so soft-boiled that for all the cheerfully chortling studio audience, the result is just the kind of depressing mundanity that drove Reggie over the edge in the first place.

Past their date but by no means rotten

In recent interviews, Harry Enfield has been portraying himself as a grumpy old man, left behind somewhere in the mid-90s by a wave of cleverer, laugh-track free comedy like The Office and struggling to make a comeback. It's a little disingenuous.

TV review: Him & Her

It's very British, very BBC3, but, with a script by Stefan Golaszewski (part of the sketch group Cowards), despite the crude references it would be inaccurate to class it alongside the shagging'n'farting obsessed likes of Two Pints Of Lager.

Simon Amstell's acting ability is so lacking that it seems to have induced the rest of the usually reliable cast - including Rebecca Front, who's so good in The Thick Of It - to try to compensate by ramping up their performances too far. The result is as painful as quasi-fictional Simon's attempt to chat up an actor, who for the purposes of mild farce ended up in the front room with all the over-the-top relatives, matchmaking with glee.

Unlike other bad sitcoms, you can't accuse Grandma's House of being thrown together with too little thought: if anything, its problem is the opposite. On paper, the comic potential of Amstell's embarrassment coming up against his knowing self-awareness is there, but on the screen it comes across as simply annoying on all counts.