Benny Hill

"Innovative" and "ground-breaking" may not be adjectives you'd usually attribute to Benny Hill, the risqué comedian. In this documentary, however, Ben Miller, an actor, makes the case for Hill's legacy to be reassessed. Following the success of The Benny Hill Show in 1965, he became the first British comedian to establish his reputation on television, rather than radio. It's no surprise to hear that Hill was obsessed with the craft of visual comedy. More unexpected is that he also played "straight" roles in a number of popular films, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Al Murray's Multiple Personality Disorder is another sketch show to add to the pile; this one less interested in being knowingly hip or an intentional cult, and more a throwback to the mainstream Harry Enfield days of the early-'90s.

Al Murray thankfully rests his increasingly tiresome Pub Landlord persona, and instead gives us a confection of colourful characters. Hit-and-miss is always the phrase applies to sketch comedy, and so it comes to be used here. Murray is an amusing fellow, and there's good support from comedians Simon Brodkin and Jenny Eclair - but only a few sketches stuck in my mind: a married couple who converse in radio advert lingo, dastardly gentleman thief Barrington Blowtorch, and some politically-correct policemen. Worryingly, half the sketches were very thin, obvious or dumb (like a Geordie pretending to be gay to perv on his sexy friend, or a baby in a high-powered business meeting), while a character called Herr Schull (a gay Nazi in pink uniform) was a rather uncomfortable and vaguely homophobic caricature I thought we left behind in the '70s with Benny Hill.

If the runaway success of The Pub Landlord gave you the impression that Al Murray was a one-trick pony, in his new sketch show he proves he can get laughs playing people with hair, too.

Often these series shove all their best sketches into the first episode then taper off in the following weeks. The opening sketch of Murray's series about a sex-mad West Country dad, however, is probably the weakest of the lot.

Fortunately, after starting out on a bum note, things can - and do - only get better. Highlights include Murray and Jenny Eclair cast as a married couple who do voice-overs and comedian Simon Brodkin, who appears in many of the sketches, brings his own creation along to the party, footballer Jason Bents.

Elsewhere, the spirit of Benny Hill lives on in Murray's gay Nazi, while at the other end of the scale we have the PC PCs - an obvious gag that's been waiting in the wings for yonks. "We know you're in there but more importantly we know that you had a very unhappy childhood..."

Jonathan Creek is reborn, after a few years away. He's looking into a series of disappearances in the attic of a big old country pile. More than the murders, though, it's about boobs. Or it certainly looks that way from where I'm sitting. They're everywhere. All the women in the show - Creek's sidekick, her mate, the killer's wife, the porn star in the strange subplot - are wearing virtually northing, and the camera never misses the opportunity to zoom in on a plunging top or a heaving chest. Oops, one of the porn star's bursts; they weren't real, it turns out. But there are still plenty more around to focus on.

To be honest I'm finding it hard to complain about ... but no, I must, this is the Guardian, for heaven's sake. It's gratuitous, all these scantily clad women about the place, simply for the titillation of the viewer. Soft porn masquerading as murder mystery. Where's Benny Hill? Probably in that bath...

Tribute is paid to a very different form of entertainment in Comedy Songs: The Pop Years. But what exactly, one of the first questions asks, is a comedy song?

"A song that makes you laugh," suggests Victoria Wood. She should know, having sung dozens in her breakthrough TV gig on consumer show, That's Life.

She's an original whose song, Let's Do It Again, is described as a mix of George Gershwin and Alan Bennett, as she celebrates "the absurdity of the mundane".

Who cannot warm to a song whose lyrics include the lines "Bend me over backwards on me Hostess trolley" and "Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly"? Eat your heart out, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The history of comedy songs reflects the changing voice of comedy in general, from music hall songs, to Peter Kay's recent number one, as Geraldine with The Winner's Song.

Writer David Quantick traces the origins of the comedy song back to "some pillock in a jester's hat with a lute, singing about his genitals to the king, making it up as he went along".

One thing about comedy songs is that they may be irritating, but you can't stop singing them. The skiffle era gave birth to such memorable ditties as Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight? What sort of mind comes up with a lyric like that?

The birth of the singles chart in the early 1950s meant that comedy songs could make money. The Barron Knights and The Goons had hits. There were topical songs at the start of TV's That Was The Week That Was, and Benny Hill sang about Ernie, who drove the fastest milkcart in the west.

Many songs came from TV shows like The Two Ronnies, The Goodies (doing the funky gibbon) and It Ain't Half Hot Mum duo Don Estelle and Windsor Davies duetting on Whispering Grass.

Comedy songs gave hits to people who wouldn't normally expect to make the charts. Barry Cryer recalls having a number one in Finland 50 years ago with a cover version of Purple People Eater - which, on reflection, sounds like something you might find in Crooked House.

New York Times Review

Things are considerably more puerile than one could imagine, because this is the kind of show in which a nerd will go on a date with a big smear of chocolate on his forehead, and the woman he is with will assume it is feces. This is Benny Hill with a hard drive.

It's almost impossible to produce incompetence deliberately. Darkplace is instantly addictive and painfully hilarious. This even though Holness isn't technically doing anything all that new (see also: Benny Hill or Carol Burnett). But Darkplace uses mistakes - miserable line readings and badly drawn characters - as fuel for a sly show business satire. Even better, it also explores 'ego', how popularity, not capability, leads to less than successful entertainment applications.

Armando Iannucci's radio show is a bit of a teeth-clencher... let's examine the components.

It's a sort of chat show, with three guests, except they aren't allowed to chat. They are there to make jokes on topics, presumably of which they have had notice, chosen to reflect the week's events. On Friday these included national holidays (Get Carter Day, suggested Will Smith, to rare studio audience silence), unlikely headlines (E.coli has entered the Big Brother house, offered Iannucci), David Cameron choosing a Benny Hill song on Desert Island Discs (here Natalie Haynes began talking, bafflingly, about shoes), who in public life you would like to kill and why (Clive Anderson pointed out that killing people is wrong, but Will Smith insisted that he still wants to kill Alan Rothwell for stealing his Action Man, the one with a parachute).

Iannucci joined in competitively and did solo riffs on why he hates Apple (his iPod froze) and his local gym. Croquet figured largely, of course, so largely that on Saturday, after the repeat, the weatherman said it would be a wonderful afternoon for it if the subject hadn't already been malleted to death.

Could it be that none of Iannucci's guests had spent enough time thinking what to say? Is it possible that Iannucci himself, back in 1990, when he was putting together the genuinely revolutionary On the Hour (and sweeping aside the News Quiz team waiting to get into the studio after him), would have allowed this show on air? I doubt it.

I think he's bored with the news and with radio. He's exhausted. He's had an exceptionally busy and productive year. Another, during which he will also set up the BBC's new comedy workshop, lies ahead. He has given energy and intelligence to some truly major work. Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive is, alas, the dregs.