Benji Wilson

Nurse was one of the radio comedies upgraded with moving pictures. Esther Coles was terrific as Liz, a careworn Community Psychiatric Nurse administering salutary chats and sedatives to a whole host of comic grotesques.

The grotesques were all played by Paul Whitehouse, as they seemingly always are. Whitehouse has been shapeshifting outrageously for many years, first in The Fast Show, then in 2005's Help (a similar endeavour where he played each of a psychiatrist's 20 or so patients), but most recently in a series of adverts for car insurance. This has had the unfortunate effect of making what should be virtuoso appear merely so-so. In Nurse his transformations were a distraction from what was a rather wonderful study of those who need help and those who give it.

Small strands of Liz's home life were dotted around the periphery - an ex-husband, a teenage son, both at the other end of the phone - suggesting that this was a series with legs. Take out the Whitehouse showboating and you had something both funny and poignant. So much recent TV comedy seems to have become very, very sad - Nurse was similar in timbre to Getting On (set in a hospital geriatric ward) or Ricky Gervais's Derek (set in a nursing home). All a world away from the karaoke catchphrase comedies of the Nineties where kids would be trilling 'Suits you sir,' the next day. Comedy has become essentially non comic.

In and Out of the Kitchen is another scion from radio that was pleasing to ear and eye without ever being particularly funny. It owed a debt to The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester's exquisite first novel about a pompous gourmand. Damian Trench is not (yet) a mass murderer like Lanchester's Tarquin Minot, but he is another florid stylist who takes his grub seriously. You sense his creator, Miles Jupp, takes comedy seriously too, as this was as carefully assembled and composed as the most exacting recipe from Le Gavroche. Occasionally Trench spoke directly to camera, occasionally there were some (rather beautifully filmed) recipe sequences, but this was capable modern sitcom, capably presented.

Trench was a snob. Almost every great comic creation is, because the gap between the snob's view of themselves and how they're viewed by others is full of comic possibilities. Unfortunately Trench's snobbery, in episode one, was particular - he couldn't abide posh restaurants or fad diets and he refused to moderate his copy for a new column in "Waitsbury's" magazine. I suspect this makes him a snob to whom few can relate, and that In and Out of the Kitchen will remain a niche pursuit. Any sitcom reliant on a running gag about Salman Rushdie has probably found its natural berth on BBC Four.

You'll be amazed to learn that I've never served in the Armed Forces, so I can't say for sure whether Bluestone 42 is accurate. I haven't watched it much before either - this was the opener of the third series - so I haven't spent time with the characters. It wasn't uproariously funny, but at least rang true. It began with an armoured vehicle being hit by an IED, just as those inside were making some pretty sick jokes about a colleague who'd lost an eye. The language was fruitier than Um Bongo and the badinage was, almost literally, gallows humour.

Getting this right - mining humour from genuine peril, in a real-life scenario - may be a stretch too far for a low-budget BBC Three comedy. But I'm glad they're trying, and I wonder what happens to these shows when BBC Three "goes online". The worry is that the lowest comic denominator fills the void, and new writers or voices that might have cut their teeth finding comedy in tragedy and so on will be left sifting through video clips or doing Paul Whitehouse's prosthetics.

Written and presented by the comic Jolyon Rubinstein, best known for pranking politicians on The Revolution Will Be Televised, An Idiot's Guide to Politics started with the assertion and concomitant question "the Facebook generation is tuning out of politics. Why?" To which the obvious answer is they're all on Facebook.

This was not so much a guide to current politics as an impressively thorough analysis of its failings. Rubinstein spoke to Zac Goldsmith, Vince Cable and Len McCluskey and even one or two authentic "young people" before concluding that the reason no one trusts politicians is because politicians tell lies.

It would be easy to dismiss Rubinstein's efforts as just more anti-establishment catcalling, and I thought that the relentless pranking - taking a lie detector to Ukip's head office; taking a cartoon statue of Ed Miliband to Unite's head office - sometimes undermined his case. But this was much more than just mockery: where Michael Cockerell's documentary Inside the Commons has been trying to show us what parliament actually is, Rubinstein was looking for things about politics we might actually change. One was demanding that MPs tell the truth. Play fair and be honest - even the four-year-olds in the playground seemed able to understand that.

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The brash, boorish Pub Landlord, Al Murray's most enduring comic creation, would probably have a thing or two to say about the Al Murray we see blinking back tears in Secrets from the Asylum. Those words might include "man up", "wuss", and "not what made Britain great", because the ITV documentary shows Murray's moving reaction to a discovery he makes about his family.