Andrea Mullaney

Nineteen-year-old Daniel Sloss from Kirkcaldy - a comedy circuit 'veteran' of three years - makes his annoyingly young debut as a sitcom star this week. The Adventures Of Daniel takes elements from Sloss's real life and fictionalises them, but less self-consciously than Simon Amstell's awkward Grandma's House. It feels like the pilot has been thrown together, which is not necessarily a bad thing but the supporting characters - mum (Imogen Stubbs), friends, girlfriend and her family - are all lightly sketched, more ideas than fully formed characters.

He's an engaging screen presence though and while there are a few too many teenage clichés, it's already better than many of BBC 3's attempts to be down with the youf.

Well, it's all very well having these brilliant detectives, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and the CSI boffins, all going round smugly knowing everything and solving stuff. Obviously, if you were actually to be the victim of a crime, that's who you'd want investigating, or at the very least diligent, efficient plodders like the police in Taggart. But what about the rest of them, the rubbish cops who don't always get their man and don't have genius-level insights merely by looking at a few stray hairs or a misplaced receipt - aren't they being a bit discriminated against by TV?

Well, that gap is somewhat filled this week with a new comedy drama, Vexed, which boasts a crime-solving duo who won't bamboozle anyone with the cleverness of their deductions. A sort of cross between Moonlighting - the classic 1980s fantasy with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd - and Jasper Carrot's spoof The Detectives, Vexed is a rather entertaining twist on the over-done crime genre.

It stars Toby Stephens and Lucy Punch - no, you'll recognise her, she's been in heaps of low-key British programmes including the more traditional detecting of Poirot and Midsomer Murders, but this is her biggest role so far as Lucy. But it's Stephens who is the revelation, taking a break from playing posh cads to revel in the role of Jack, who thinks he is a smooth charmer and great cop... when in fact, he's so useless he can't remember the names of anyone involved in the investigation (at one point he wonders if the victim was 'Andrew Ridgely' only to be informed that he's thinking of Wham!) and is prone to falling off his chair in the middle of interrogations.

Stephens' performance is great fun and a refreshing change from know-it-all detectives; Jack knows nothing, but is convinced that his instincts are right. "We're police officers," he drawls, "the law doesn't apply to us." Punch's role is to keep him in line and restrain her partner's more outrageous antics but, thankfully, she does get to be funny too.

The plot of this first episode is appropriately silly - about murders linked to a supermarket loyalty card scheme database, which distracts Lucy and Jack into using the info on it to sneak on what her ex and his potential partners are buying. And the comedy elements work better than the drama: it's hard to get really concerned about a dangerous situation when you know that there are not going to be any serious ramifications. So I'm not sure how long the series can sustain its freshness but it's a nice alternative for now.

I was never a fan of the practical jokes of The Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle - in fact, I think I had forgotten him until this tribute - but it certainly did its job in changing my opinion of the man himself. Frankly, it's almost impossible for me to dislike someone who loved books so much that he had an extension built onto his house to hold his library of 30,000 - that's living the dream! He was even buried under a gravestone representing books, with the epitaph "Ask my friends" and that's what this show did, eliciting what seemed to be genuinely heartfelt memories of a decent chap.

As well as being an apparently good father, stepfather, husband and friend, he relentlessly raised money for charity through marathon quiz sessions and auctions - around £100 million. "Oh, that's just showing off," said his former Game For A Laugh co-star Matthew Kelly, in awe.

But he still became something of a hate figure, once coming second to Saddam Hussein in an unpopularity poll, and a by-word for a type of trashy telly which, nevertheless, flourished even after he was dumped from his prime time slots. His family said he was hurt by the reversal of fortunes and, as fellow quasi-hate figure Chris Tarrant pointed out, it was strange how he went from being over-exposed to being a TV pariah for years, only able to appear in panto villain roles like Ant & Dec's Banged up with Beadle slot.

Ironically, he'd have probably fared better in today's celeb-crazy television environment; he could have made a good guest on Who Do You Think You Are, fronted a documentary on disability or just gone round the country on a spacehopper or something. And yet, there's a lesson there: Jeremy Beadle's fall wasn't due to his own failings or a sudden turn against cheesy pranks (still going strong on John Barrowman's excruciating Tonight's The Night). People just got sick of the sight of him - and today's actors, presenters and rent-a-guests should probably take note.

The definition of insanity, according to someone-or-other, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The equivalent in a television review is complaining that a new BBC3 sitcom is puerile piffle - and yet, how can we avoid it?

There are so many of them and (with a few honourable exceptions, each a delightful surprise as they buck the trend) they are so bad. No-one ever admits to liking them, whether in the right age bracket they are supposedly targeted at or not, yet still they come, on and on, a grim onslaught of unfunny scenarios and jokes that most ten-year-old boys would reject as childish.

The latest is Inn Mates and what's most disappointing about this pilot effort isn't the lameness of its setting - a pub called The Friendship Inn, where various 20-somethings drink, get off with each other and trade unwitty banter - or script, but the "boast" that its writer, John Warburton, is the first person to have gone through the BBC's College of Comedy and get their script on screen. That was a scheme set up for aspiring sitcom writers which chose six people to have their scripts mentored and workshopped for a year before deciding if any would become a show.

The mind boggles at the ones which were rejected and at the idea that Inn Mates - whose jokes include someone getting Stanley Matthews the footballer and Bernard Matthews the turkey farmer mixed up - can have gone through so much yet still resemble a sub-par episode of Two Pints Of Lager..., BBC3's apparent idea of the ne plus ultra of comic achievement.

As well as its young cast, Neil Morrissey pops up as the sperm donor father of one character - his catchphrase is "I'm not your dad!" - who looks utterly depressed by it all. Given that he appeared in five series of Men Behaving Badly, this is a terrible indictment.

It is, of course, unfair to attack a young writer's first script, to judge a potential series by its pilot and to expect BBC3's young target audience to enjoy the likes of Rev or Roger And Val Have Just Got In. But comedy's a tough business and it's also unfair to keep churning out these unfunny booze-and-shagging sitcoms. For the love of God, please stop.

Stanley Park clearly aspires to the E4 mould of teenage comedy like The Inbetweeners and Misfits. Though Morwenna Banks plays a mum, as in Skins, these are not the angst-ridden, articulate youths of that show, but more gormless, ordinary adolescents who snog people at the swing park and argue about Twitter.

It's hard to sum up the premise and the plot didn't seem to have much scope, as confident, doll-faced Debbie who believes that she's sex on legs got off with the virginal twit that her more gothic friend liked. The characters seem to have more going on than could be fitted in here, perhaps because they originate from a stage play. There were some funny lines though: when the boy's parents walked in on him and Debbie, who had been snacking on crisps during underwhelming kitchen sex, his mum wailed: "I've just had that table varnished... wait, are those my chargrilled chicken crinkles?" "I couldn't help myself, they were more-ish," shrugged the vamp.

Having had her own fine sitcom, Pulling, pulled by BBC3 for being too old for the channel's demographic, poor Sharon Horgan has had insult added to injury by being cast as the past-it, lonely auntie. Ouch.

Dappers, written by Catherine Johnson (who wrote the bits between the songs in Mamma Mia!), is set in Bristol with lots of lovely rolling accents.

Leonora Crichlow and Ty Glaser play young mums on benefit, who cart their toddlers everywhere as they try to make cash and keep their spirits up.

The plot wasn't great, with a dog-walking scheme resulting in the inevitable mix up of two identical pugs, but the characters and their world already felt rounded, from the endearing girls, to their ineffective baby-fathers, the smug yuppies next door who have everything they don't and Eddie Large as a peculiar neighbour. I could happily watch more, with a bit of development of the stories and a few funnier lines.

Already commissioned for a series (unfortunately) is Lee Nelson's Well Good Show, a new comedy which is, well, bad. It's written and performed by stand-up Simon Brodkin, whose character Nelson is a cross between Marvin from BBC Scotland's The Scheme and 1980's Loadsamoney.

Lee says his catchphrase - "Qualiteeee!" - a lot, and makes the forbearing audience join in some stupid antics. For instance, a young man is ordered to choose from an array of girls with their backs to him. One is revealed to be a man with long hair, another - oh the horror! - is old, etc.

The show seems convinced that old people are intrinsically funny, it also features a lady taking her teeth out and gurning, and the regular big finale is his "nan" singing karaoke.

It's meant to be ironic, of course, but that's a feeble excuse for such an unoriginal and hopelessly unamusing embarrassment.

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It's sort of impressive that Marc Wootton maintains his characters through the improvised conversations, but it's rarely actually funny, unless you enjoy the sight of people you've never heard of getting irritated with an idiot. And it's not satire either simply to present Hollywood as a place of fools on the make. As the legendary mogul Sam Goldwyn once said: let's have some new cliches.

Kristen Schaal stars as Penelope, Princess Of Pets, who can talk to the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk to the animals. This Comedy Lab pilot started as internet sketches and is proudly low-budget - the heroine's pals are deliberately ropey puppets and the jokes are cheap, too.

It should be terrible, but thanks to Schaal's wide-eyed charm and some delightful silliness, I laughed much more than it deserved.

Though made by only two members of The League of Gentlemen, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, Psychoville is clearly twinned with Royston Vasey. It has the same grotesque characters, the same creepy, dependent relationships. But unlike the League, they're living, more or less, in the real world - the joke, repeatedly, is the clash between the gothic nightmare and the ordinary.

There is a clown whose idea of a "princess party" for a girl is more like a torture party; there are feuding panto dwarves, one of whom has a crush on Snow White; there is an uncomfortable mother and son duo with a worrying knowledge of serial killers. But the scariest of all is played by Dawn French, as a nurse with an obsessive love for her 'baby'. She is what you imagine the truth to be behind those documentaries about people who keep monkeys as children or believe they are married to the Eiffel Tower.

On paper, Psychoville should seem like a retread, but the ongoing mystery - many of the characters are receiving anonymous letters - and some disturbing but genuine laughs keep it compelling.