Bill Bailey (I)

If you've decided to spend New Year's Eve on the sofa, this feast of funny will see you through a hefty chunk of the evening. Earlier this year, two dozen of the nation's finest comics performed at London's O2 Arena to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital. They included Bill Bailey, Alan Carr (both backed by Stomp), Ricky Gervais and Catherine Tate. Not that it'll affect your viewing experience at home but, in case you're interested, this comedy extravaganza (first broadcast in April) was the self-proclaimed biggest stand-up show in UK history.

I met Ronnie Corbett once. It was during my time as a gossip columnist on this paper. I spotted him at a party and, somewhat starstruck, decided to approach and introduce myself. He was all right, I suppose, though not terribly polite. He didn't, he sniffed, read The Independent. More of a Telegraph man (must be the jokes). Anyway, he's 80 now, and BBC2 has devoted a few hours of scheduling to the occasion. First up was a rerun of The Two Ronnies Christmas Special from 1984, and then Being Ronnie Corbett, a fawning programme of dedications. We got Matt Lucas and David Walliams, Catherine Tate and Michael Palin, Miranda Hart, Rob Brydon, Stephen Merchant, and Bill Bailey. Even Bruce Forsyth put in an appearance. They all heaped praise on him, and deservedly so. After all, it wasn't them he was rude to at a party, was it? And he's jolly funny, or used to be, back in the day. Repeated clips of The Frost Report and The Two Ronnies were testimony to that. His more recent stuff, less so. That Extras sketch is great, of course - "a bit of whiz, you know? To blow away the cobwebs" - but, really, Ronnie, Little Britain? "I was just grateful to be included," was his explanation. And, to be honest, I believe him. This is a man whose raison d'être has been making people laugh; of course, he wants to keep up with the times. Why else would he agree to cuddle a half-naked Lucas in the least funny show on television?

The BBC is onto a good thing by celebrating this comedy legend while he's still very much alive and kicking. National treasures are usually whored out by broadcasters until every last drop of funny (and money) has been squeezed out of them, or ignored until they've passed away.

With its subject still in the land of the living, the mood of the programme was celebratory and jovial, with Corbett himself appearing as the star talking head. Of course there was plenty of retrospect as he looked back over his career, but the fact remains that Ronnie has clearly retained all his faculties and is still a very funny man.

For those who enjoy analysing and dissecting comedy - as opposed to merely laughing at it - it was a sweet little study of what makes this man so funny. His height (or lack thereof) is, of course, a major factor, but his natural talent is undeniable.

Corbett looked back fondly and honestly on his long career, with the help of more fashionable comedians like Stephen Merchant and Rob Brydon. Happily, given the many programmes the BBC is dedicating to him over Christmas, he suffers neither from the startling arrogance, nor from the false modesty that seems to afflict so many stars.

It's true that his particular style of comedy isn't to modern tastes and the old clips will look like camp variety acts to young eyes, but with everyone from Miranda Hart to Bill Bailey claiming to have been inspired by The Two Ronnies, it's hard to deny their appeal.

Given the insight promised by the title Being Ronnie Corbett, it's tempting to make a Ronnie-esque joke about what the weather's like down there for the vertically challenged comedian, but I won't. That doesn't count...

Little Crackers, the title of Sky's specially commissioned comedy shorts, is something of a hostage to fortune, underlining the fact that the snap doesn't work in all of them and the jokes are sometimes a bit duff. But Bill Bailey's "Car Park Babylon" was very satisfying. Bailey played a technologically obsessed loner who finds himself on the receiving end of supernatural punishment, after failing to show sufficient Christmas spirit. This is a fairly standard template for a Christmas tale, I suppose, but the pleasure here came from the agency of his comeuppance, which wasn't some chain-clanking ghoul but a malevolent car park pay station. Having taken his last remaining cash - to the accompaniment of comically extended whirrings and clonks - the machine began to communicate with him through a tiny speaker, talking in ways that suggested Bailey wasn't its first victim. The last shot you saw was the machine in bleak subterranean isolation, the tinny sound of Bailey singing a desperate Christmas carol leaking from its innards.

The feast of comic shorts continues with Jo Brand and Bill Bailey's offerings. Brand whisks us back to 1972 - when she is a hormonal teenager in a strop because her parents have moved house and her beloved cat Fluff is missing. But it's when the fondue set comes out that things get really ugly. In Bailey's wonderfully zany film, he's a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park when the technological world turns against him. Only through the voice in the pay-and-display machine will he find redemption.

The excellent Little Crackers series continues with two more autobiographical comic shorts. First, at 9.00pm, Jo Brand takes us back to 1972, a time when fondue sets were all the rage and the comedian was a hormonal teenager sulking because her parents had moved house. Then, in the second of tonight's instalments at 9.15pm, Bill Bailey plays a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park.

More remembrances of things past, this time from Jo Brand and Bill Bailey. Brand sets the controls for the heart of 1972 where her teenage self is having a bad time of it. Her family has money worries, they are moving town and she's being bullied at her new school - until she meets her saviour Susan Pigg. Bailey takes a different approach to the other Little Crackers by not setting his story in his childhood. He plays himself, a grouch who doesn't know the meaning of Christmas spirit.

Running nightly this week are this year's seasonal shorts little crackers from Sky One, which annually tries to make up for the dearth of decent original drama and comedy from January-November by gorging us with a festive selection box featuring some of the best-known names in the business.

This time they've got the likes of Victoria Wood, Catherine Tate, Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke, Julian Barratt, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey - oh, the list goes on, basically anyone who's ever appeared on a panel game is either appearing in, writing or directing one of these 12-minute films, mostly based on autobiographical stories about their childhoods.

And like a selection box, there are a few yucky praline noisette ones. David Baddiel's film is as annoying as he is, though it does feature a good impersonation of Record Breakers star Norris McWhirter by Alastair McGowan, who must have been delighted to get a chance to do an impression he probably last did as a child. Chris O'Dowd has a dull grumpy Santa story and Dawn French oddly casts herself as the late Queen Mother.

But there are some nice strawberry cream ones too: Victoria Wood's is a sweet, nostalgic tale, Julian Barratt's teenaged heavy metallers are quirky and Kathy Burke's memory of meeting Joe Strummer is endearing. Anyway, they're all over so quickly that even the ho-hum ones are watchable enough - shame though that for Sky, decent original programmes come barely more than once a year.

Bill Bailey interview

Bill Bailey] takes part in Sky's Little Crackers comedy series and can also be seen in his show, Dandelion Mind, at Wyndham's Theatre in London.

The cream of the British comedy crop come together for this series of brand new comedy shorts for Sky1 HD. Following a season of dramatic 10 Minute Tales last Christmas, this December it's Comedy's turn to shine in an anthology of short films, written by and featuring 12 of the nation's biggest and most loved comic stars. With the likes of Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, Julia Davis and Bill Bailey flexing their creative muscles they're the perfect bite-sized morsel of entertainment for you and your family this Christmas. Tonight it's the turn of Victoria Wood and Chris O'Dowd who get the season underway.