Andy Hamilton (II)

When Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton satirised media values in their Nineties sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey they produced a perceptive but gentle chiding of failing newsroom standards and most journalists loved it. They won't have found Hacks so funny.

The phone-hacking scandal is no media industry in-joke but an already much-publicised story of shameful events that the audience will have instantly recognised.

It was snappily written but it seems almost futile to try to exaggerate for comic effect the extreme methods that we know were actually employed at the News of the World. So when we saw Tabby, the pearl-wearing royal correspondent for the Sunday Comet, tasked with hacking the phone calls of the "Ginger Prince" we well knew the dapper Clive Goodman - her real life equivalent at the News of the World - was up to so much more.

Channel 4 ran the inevitable disclaimer: "The characters and events in this film are entirely fictitious." That may not have satisfied ex-staffers at the News of the World. Former showbiz editor Rav Singh and former investigations editor Mazher "The Fake Sheikh" Mahmood (neither of whom have been accused of criminal activity) can't have been impressed at the portrayal of the Sunday Comet's most scurrilous reporter Rav Musharraf (Kayvan Novak), who is shown trying to blag documents in the voices of Desmond Tutu, Sean Connery and Prince Philip ("just fax me the bleeding bank statement you imbecile").

Novak's was one of many slick performances. Claire Foy was scary as a ruthless editor with some of the ambitious traits of Rebekah Brooks. Michael Kitchen deftly played Stanhope Feast, a media baron with an Australian accent, a fruity vocabulary and a feisty young Oriental wife with a talent for close combat, Ho Chi Mao Feast (Eleanor Matsuura).

Hackgate has been such a gripping and multi-dimensional story that the hour-long drama rattled along at the pace of a good Sunday tabloid. And with the Leveson inquiry still unfolding, much of the material felt hot off the press. Scotland Yard should have squirmed at Russ Abbot's portrayal of a top cop and politicians were expertly lampooned for their obsequiousness towards the media.

But the Channel 4 audience, amused as it might have been by this all-too-real tale of tabloid excess, will have been left with little sense of the value of journalism. The role of other newspapers in exposing hacking was skipped over, leaving Ray (Phil Davis), a veteran reporter with an aversion to the dark arts, to represent Fleet Street's conscience.

Rupert Murdoch's influence on British media culture was mercilessly satirised. Hacks ended with an abandoned Stanhope Feast, hopping mad on his skyscraper helipad as the pages of his dead newspaper blew away in the wind. But the real life mogul is still worth more than $7bn and his News Corp empire generates $33bn a year in revenues, so that part at least was indeed entirely fictitious.

Video: The cast and writer of Outnumbered on Christmas

The chaotic Brockman family from the hit comedy series Outnumbered are back for a festive special this weekend.

They've decided to go away for Christmas, but as per usual it's not exactly stress-free.

Two of the stars of the series, Tyger Drew-Honey and Daniel Roche, joined the show's writer Andy Hamilton on the BBC Breakfast sofa to talk about Christmas in the Brockman household.

Audio book review: Old Harry's Game Christmas specials

Newly available on Audio book just in time to find its way into Santa's sack is last year's Christmas edition of Old Harry's Game. For those who have missed Andy Hamilton's radio sitcom on BBC Radio 4 the audio show features Andy Hamilton as Satan.

The News Quiz] (Radio 4, Friday) returned for a 75th series last week, its host Sandi Toksvig and contestants Dominic Lawson, Jeremy Hardy, Andy Hamilton and Fred MacAulay keen to get at what must be one of the richest current affairs harvests in living memory. As ever, Hamilton had the best lines, noting that the name of Libyan diplomat Moussa Koussa "sounds like an ABBA track" and comparing the all-party select committee responsible for grilling Rupert and James Murdoch to "a panel comprised of Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, Dale Winton, Jim Bowen and Sooty". (Listeners were left to guess which MP most closely resembles a small glove-puppet bear.)

The format may now be as well worn and familiar as an old cardigan, but it's no less welcome for that.

An anthropologist of the future wanting to study the life of British children in the early 21st century would have a field day with Outnumbered, the sitcom beloved of the middle classes because it so precisely seems to reflect their lives.

In the opening episode of the fourth series, shown on Friday, daughter Karen is having a conversation with her mother, Sue, who has just started to work full-time. "It's a mum's duty to pick up her children from school," she opines.

When her mother points out that she herself might like to work when she grows up, her retort is swift: "See, you're getting aggressive. That's what happens to women who work like men. They start turning into men. They get hairy chests and they smash up town centres." Sue exclaims in exasperation, but Karen barely looks up from her colouring. "You're getting aggressive. You'll get hairy." As a mother who works full time and spends a lot of the rest of my life sitting around kitchen tables having remarkably similar chats with my offspring, the exchange made me rock both with laughter and recognition. It is this sense of shared experience that has made Outnumbered, written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, but also partly improvised by its cast, such a success.

Whereas most television sitcoms, such as My Family, which preceded it on screen last week, rely on incident, plot and comic misunderstanding to raise a laugh, Outnumbered is always at its best when its characters are simply bumbling through the mundane business of their lives: the fight over the Wii controller, the cheese stuck in the toaster, the dinosaur melted in the microwave, the keys which vanish just as you are leaving home.

It is particularly sharp on the vagaries of modern language: this week's conversations about the use of the word "gay" could have been recorded in many homes as a generation of school children apply it in the new sense of "feeble" to the horror of their parents who have co-opted it (against the wishes of a previous generation) to mean homosexual. The glee of the children when their father described the Wii controller as a "nunchuck" - "you said you'd never say that, you said that it wasn't a real word" - was equally astute.

From the anthropological point of view, however, it is the way in which the children behave that is of most interest. The family depicted in Outnumbered is one where the children rule: their parents are hapless, helpless adjuncts to the kids' power. It is not only that the youngsters argue each and every point. It is that on many occasions - such as Karen's decision to attend her uncle's funeral - they get their own way against the wishes of their parents.

In this way, Outnumbered depicts the sea change in behaviour in which a generation brought up to be submissive to its parents, finds itself once again in thrall - but this time to its children. For all its humour, it is essentially true.

Outnumbered: Leader of the comedy revolution?

Combining fine actor improvisation, a smart script and some relatively innocuous storylines to paint a familiar picture of the 'joys' of family life, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's creation has amassed enough prizes to make Alex Ferguson go green-eyed. But with the kids another year older I wondered if it could still cut it.

Hell's intake is at its highest since records began. Satan is beginning to feel the strain and the last thing he needs, quite frankly, is all the palaver of Christmas "In the world of men it's December, so they're having their annual moronfest... a soaked in sentimental tosh about a fat old man who comes down chimneys with presents for children and who, in real life, would probably be shot as a paedophile trespasser." Bah, humbug, Mr Beelzebub. And so, Satan descends upon Earth to do his best to cancel Christmas. Boundaries of taste will be pushed to the limits, as always, by Andy Hamilton and co, but it's the funniest thing on air this fortnight.

Going Off Air with The News Quiz

And so, the last News Quiz of the series is in the bag, with the usual funnies from our esteemed panel of Andy Hamilton, Miles Jupp, Phill Jupitus and Jeremy Hardy.

The News Quiz Benefit

This week's News Quiz lineup consists of Andy Hamilton, Miles Jupp, Sue Perkins and Jeremy Hardy. But as we had a picture of most of them last week, instead here's Sandi with one of our excellent script writers - Simon Littlefield.

Britain's Next Top News Quiz

Tonight's News Quiz on Radio 4 sees the esteemed panel of Francis Wheen and Jeremy Hardy slogging it out against Sue Perkins and Andy Hamilton to win points from Sandi Toksvig by answering questions about topical events. Who will win? We literally don't know*. (*We literally do. The show was recorded on Thursday night. We're just not telling.)