Caitlin Moran

On Thursday, the return of That Mitchell and Webb Look served up a clinical assassination of The Apprentice, and its viewers. Webb and Mitchell are BBC producers, in the process of inventing The Apprentice. Webb is asking Mitchell why anyone would want to watch a show where, every week, a bunch of idiots screw things up. "Everyone will think that they're the only person to have noticed that all the contestants are idiots," Mitchell beams. "I've got a hunch that, for some reason, people feel this never stops being worth commenting on." "And remind me," Webb asks, "how do these ironic viewers show up in the ratings?" "They show up the same, my friend. They show up just the same."

The culturally incisive nature of Mitchell and Webb's sketch comedy is one thing. Increasingly, however, the news that many will want to know about the third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look is this: currently, just how scorching do Mitchell and Webb look? Has it become any easier to work out which one you'd have sex with first? As a diligent correspondent I can report that the important facts, viz the first episode, are:

Mitchell in full Victorian rig, shouting "Have you got any idea how hot I am?" Mitchell lounging on a sofa reading a newspaper, just like he would if he were your husband, and you lived together. Webb as Santa's evil brother, Russ, singing an absolutely filthy, 18-certificate version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town - and then kissing a woman with his sensual, endless man-mouth.

Insane man-hotness aside, this third series of Look has an unexpected, and profoundly thrilling, sense of going up a gear. In the first episode, at least, Mitchell and Webb seem to have chucked out all the old stalwarts - no Numberwang, no tramps with head-cams - and, instead, turned in the tightest, brightest half-hour of sketch comedy since A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

If the rest of the series is as effortlessly superior as the first episode, Mitchell and Webb will probably be credited with reviving the long-dormant TV sketch show. And making a long, hot summer borderline unbearable for a lot of women.

At the very opposite end of the comedy scale was Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a fantasy satire starring Matt Lucas. Anyone who had seen the title would have calculated the chances of it not being bad as pitifully low.

It is a title that makes it very clear that you are entering a world where the name "Krod Mandoon" is a potent comedy currency - a world where knights say "Ni!", and every night is 2-4-1 down the Student Union bar. Krod Mandoon (played, with wilful casting randomness, by Sean Maguire, aka Tegs from Grange Hill) is an uptight warrior. His gang of freedom fighters include a black jive-talking genie with erratic magical powers, and Muldoon's pugilistic girlfriend - a foxy pagan who refuses to wear knickers. This threadbare band of wackily inverted stereotypes has an arch-nemesis: Chancellor Dongalor (Matt Lucas), whose comedy chops are left uselessly over-revved on lines as poor as "I am scared of nothing! Except turtles. They give me the willies".

The problem with the show is that, as a genre, fantasy is, of course, already absolutely ludicrous. You can't satirise it by making it even more ludicrous - to do so just results in an Upper Sixth trainwreck of wee-wee-jokes, mild homophobia and gurning.

Caitlin Moran Review

ITV1's new comedy-drama, Boy Meets Girl, is really good. The premise of the show does hold the threat that it could, ultimately, sputter out in an orgy of man/woman huggin'n'learnin' - but so far, the prospects are good for a satisfyingly bumpy ending.

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, and Brooker's sudden, dramatic appearance in a neck brace last week, explained the end-of-series chaos, with a 'best of' running last week, and the last 'new' episode finally running this week - presumably around outpatient appointments and physiotherapy.

Newswipe has, after an oddly muted start, been like a shotgun in a field of crows - more adept at countering the 21st-century media slide into goonery, retardation and witchcraft than almost anything available, including Jeremy Paxman's sneer.

Newswipe's great gift has been to dispel the idea that current affairs is so huge, complex and about Israel that we can never hope to get a handle on it - something that even Brooker himself seemed to believe, despairingly, at the start of the series. Instead, it gently illuminated the fact that simply thinking about what you've watched, and then asking yourself what your true opinion of it is, is more than half the battle.

The other half is, of course, laughing at Newswipe, and then writing down all of Brooker's elegant, angry perspicuity in a jotter marked "Good points well made". The News, Brooker pointed out, used to be a factual programme, to which we would then have an emotional response. But, since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, this has become reversed: the news has taken to first asking us for our emotional opinion, then covering it as a "factual" event - as with Baby P "public outrage", Jade Goody "public sorrow", etc.

And that's if there are any "facts" at all: in the following show, Brooker furiously flicked between footage of bleeding Thai protesters, and then viewers' pictures of snowmen from the recent Big Snow, while shouting "News! Not news! News! Not news!", like Matthew Broderick shouting "Learn! Learn!" at the rampaging supercomputer WOPR in War Games.

Brooker is the nearest this country has to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the US programme that has single-handedly dragged the collective American IQ up ten points since the start of the recession. It's neither here nor there if Brooker's in a neck-brace and unable to put on his own trousers without help from a nurse. We just need him to crack on with another series.

The Times Review

Personally, I engage with the escalating depression and insanity of Clunes's Perrin more than I did with Rossiter's - who, however talented an actor, couldn't quite cover up the fact that he would have been a ferociously bitter, difficult and demanding next-door neighbour, say; or company if seated next to him at a dinner party.

What happened to Red Dwarf?

When Red Dwarf returned this week, after a decade-long hiatus, it became clear that the big issue is not the social acceptability of sci-fi - but simply that this is a pitifully weak revival.

News waffle was the enemy on Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - the new show from the newspaper critic. Newswipe began on an odd note - tortuously spending five minutes explaining what it was, when anyone who'd seen it in the listings had simply thought: "Oh, Newswipe. That will be like Brooker's previous series - Screenwipe - but about current affairs, instead of telly." Also - and perhaps inevitably - Newswipe had the faint, cordite smell of The Day Today clinging to its hair. For half an hour it was a show that basically wanted to say, in the words of Chris Morris: "These are the headlines. I wish to God they weren't."

Still, Brooker's schtick - an intelligent, liberal man brought to the brink of despair simply by looking at the BBC's homepage - is as welcome dissecting the German high-school shootings as it is Holby; and having an ROFL Newsnight is something to cling to in the schedules.

The primary concept is one of baffling unreasonableness. Members of the public are encouraged to write in with their "wacky" suggestions for future inventions - basically rehashes of the "Letter Bocks" pages of Viz. If they are chosen, they then have to stand up and fill five minutes of prime-time television sparring with two professional comedians - who, additionally, have had time to prepare relevant material - in order to "win". As you would expect, it's a bloodbath - like a light entertainment Wounded Knee, but with a studio audience.

In the opening episode, Dave Gorman and Catherine Tate "challenged" four members of the public on their inventions, which included an anorak with an extra hood, for sharing with a friend, and some surrealist, sub-Vic Reeves nonsense about winning a race on stilts. As soon as Tate and Gorman started on them it was like watching two cats idly biting at frogs they'd found in the garden.

The BBC amazes me. It takes four years for Stewart Lee - a comedian with 17 years' experience - to get a six-part series; yet in Genius wholly inexperienced members of the public are expected to deliver five minutes of broadcast-quality improvised material at the drop of a hat. What, literally, is that all about?

The brilliance of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Anyway, is Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle very clever and funny, and full of things that you are still thinking about the next morning while you jog in the spring sunshine at 8am? Yes. Of course.

Putting the ham in Pratchett's Hog

Marc Warren is doing well at the moment, isn't he? He appears to have cornered the market in portraying mordant, otherworldly characters with perverse blood-lust - maybe after realising that Tamzin Outhwaite just wasn't going to go that final length, after all. Over Christmas we'll be seeing him as an extremely kinky Count Dracula on the BBC. Last night, meanwhile, Warren was the lisping assassin in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather on Sky One (Sunday; concludes tonight).