Andrea Mullaney

For a sitcom now in its third series, and which has won prestigious, international awards, Not Going Out is peculiarly bad. It comes to something when the most unbelievable part of an episode is not the plot in which Lee (the stand-up Lee Mack who also writes much of the show) became convinced that he'd got his landlady pregnant by sharing her bathwater.

No, that would be their shared flat, supposedly in the middle of London and so huge that it makes the apartments in Friends - which the show would dearly love to be - look like cupboards. What do these people do to afford this? Are they drug dealers, minor royalty, lottery winners?

You're not meant to worry about that, just go with it as they sling insults at each other in strange conversations that are like nothing resembling the way actual people talk. And actual people don't constantly address each other standing in the middle of a room, arms hanging at their sides. The more it goes on, the more fascinating it becomes. Someone enters, someone else immediately walks over to stand parallel to them, delivering puns in turns until the scene is over, then they do it again. You know who actually does have conversations like this? People on stage, which is where Not Going Out is filmed, in front of a live studio audience, who are in hysterics. I think you really had to be there.

There's more realism in The Old Guys than Not Going Out, within the comic boundaries that allow characters to bet on holding off going to the toilet and then when becoming desperate, decide to go in the kitchen sink, whereupon they are caught by an entire party of guests. But at least the leads, Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger in Only Fools And Horses) and Clive Swift (Richard in Keeping Up Appearances) are very experienced actors who make their performances seem natural.

It's written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who also write the brilliant Peep Show, and the lazy description is that the old guys are Mark and Jeremy grown older but no wiser. The odd couple - conventional guy, crazy guy - is such a perennial set up because it works, but while this ticked along pleasantly, the jokes just didn't seem to be there.

Of course, BBC Scotland already has another pensioner sitcom in Still Game, which has a sense of place and a specific culture to play off that, so far, The Old Guys lacks.

The culture in Good Arrows is that of professional darts, with its beer bellies and working men's clubs, but colliding with the world of Heat magazine. This one-off mockumentary was co-written by Irvine Welsh - who surely was responsible for the bit with one of the foulest home-made drugs ever conceived, involving bodily waste - and based around a hapless filmmaker trying to profile Andy 'The Arrows' Samson, known as "the David Beckham of the darts world". Or at least according to his pushy wife and manager, insisting that they're plagued by paparazzi - or will be, any day now.

This was a broad satire, with easy targets like celebrity culture, darts players being thick, and the wife (Katy Brand) squeezing herself into inappropriate outfits. There were a few dark laughs, such as the charity stunt gone wrong when Samson tried to throw a dart into an apple on a boy's head, William Tell-style. But the joke ran its course in half an hour - yet there was another 90 minutes to go. There was simply no need for such length, but as Welsh also directed and produced, perhaps there was no one to rein him in.

Coming Of Age may be the worst BBC Three sitcom yet. It is, like most of the channel's output, supposedly aimed at teenagers, even written by one (19-year-old Tim Dawson), but I refuse to believe that even the easiest-to-please teenager is happy to accept something so horribly written, horribly acted and horribly vulgar in lieu of actual humour.

The set-up, such as it is, is about a gang of sixth-years more obsessed with shagging one another than studying (as is their teacher). One cries: "If I fail my A-levels, I'm gonna have to go to drama school!" All I can say is the cast must clearly have been highly academically gifted.

Coming Of Age, believe it or not, makes Two Pints Of Lager look like the height of wit. Actually, the makers doubtless look up to Two Pints as vintage comic genius, the Porridge or Fawlty Towers of their generation. Oh, god.