Caitlin Moran

There's an extra reason to tune in to this episode of Rufus Hound's comedy interview series, where celebs come on to gamely read from their awful adolescent journals: for author and ace newspaper columnist Caitlin Moran, her life at 15 and 16 was so extraordinary that Channel 4 are planning to base a sitcom on it, which Moran herself will write.

The show, working title The Big Object, is set to focus on an overweight teen's family life and hunt for a boyfriend. This blast from the source material includes Moran's contemporaneous reaction to being home-schooled in Wolverhampton, to living with seven younger siblings and indeed, amid all that, publishing The Chronicles of Narmo, her first and only novel.

Caitlin Moran delivers Channel 4 sitcom pilot

Caitlin Moran, the award-winning Times columnist and author of the bestselling book How to Be a Woman, has written the pilot for a Channel 4 sitcom about an overweight 16-year-old looking for a boyfriend.

The new show Roger & Val is not perfect by any means. Sometimes the performances tip over a trifle into sitcom mannerism, and there's a slight, odd stillness to the direction that sometimes makes it feel a little claustrophobic.

But that may be the intent; the show is based on the 1st half hour after a couple Roger & Val get home from work: the bit where two lives re-merge, in a swirl of eddies and cross currents. As such, it's a purposefully small world - a two hander between Alfred Molina and Dawn French, playing with a dense, multi-layered, tapestry-fine script. You can see why Molina and French - neither exactly desperate for work - went for the roles. Unlike most sitcoms, you genuinely don't know what's going to happen next: a fairly extraordinary turn of events when the first episode revolves around Roger & Val merely looking through their 'big drawer' for the guarantee for the Hoover.

Roger's too-interested mention of Angela from Legal is worked in with exquisite poised delicacy - like a Victorian micro-mosaic brooch. The build up to a wholly inappropriate phone call to her lands as sure footed as a tiger. And by the time Val goes temporarily insane - tearing up the hoover guarantee and throwing it all over the garage floor - you have your hand over your mouth in shock. At this point I feel excited about next week's episode. Almost nervous. It feels like it has a whole, dark, alarming world to explore just in Roger & Val's kitchen.

I think we all know what BBC Three is for - in a nutshell: bum bum titty titty ha-ha - but its new sitcom, Mongrels, has caused me no small amount of odd times.

On paper, I am so there. Its pitch makes me pitch. A puppet show, but for adults? About a metrosexual fox, mardy pigeon, spoilt Afghan hound and a borderlineretarded Mexican cat called Marion (male)? A show in which the humour comes in "salty dark tang", and other savoury flavours for the amusement epicure? That is an entertainment buffet that I shall approach with a large plate. I am going to fill my hoot-boots on this one. Step back, boys - Mummy's on her lunch break, and it's going to be soup and a rofl.

And, indeed, the first two minutes looked insanely promising. The metrosexual fox - Nelson - is fixing up blind dates on MySpace and abusing someone else's credit card. We cut to the former CBBC presenter Toby Anstis, staring at his credit card bill and exclaiming, "Thirty-six quid? To Duchy Originals?" before cutting back to the fox stuffing its face with Ginger Thins. The sheer random unexpectedness of it was rousing - I thought I was in for a half-hour of solid lulz-a-poppin'.

But three minutes later, a trend started to emerge. Gags on 9/11, Harold Shipman, Christopher Reeve, Anne Frank and Richard Whiteley - castration, urination, a dog trying to poo on a bed, and a song called F*** Chickens, in which the conceit was that chickens are a bit like immigrants. Look - these are nervous times for comedy, particularly at the BBC. In a post- Sachsgate world, approval for edgy humour is a nightmare, and getting new comedy commissioned in the first place is about as easy as trying for a unicorn with IVF. Mongrels felt as though someone had taken a winningly daft idea and then top-loaded it with every single edgy joke submitted to the BBC in the past two years, so that Compliance could go through them all in one time-efficient go. The end result was to have you still wincing from the previous miss-hit base joke as the next one came along. It made you feel a bit... sore, after a while.

It was a sad waste of fake fur and a dandy, metrosexual fox.

Have a laugh on Ricky Gervais

Gervais laughing is the sound of the largest, smuggest gas leak in history.

Lizzie and Sarah is a pilot for a new series by Jessica Hynes, née Stevenson, and Julia Davis, and so dark it makes deep space look like a copy of The White Album.

Both Lizzie and Sarah are fiftysomething housewives in marriages of dull horror, which they keep meticulously dusted and polished. Sarah's husband has sex with her with a pillow over her face - when he finishes, she says, meekly, "Thank you".

Lizzie is in thrall to her au pair, Benita. Huge, sullen and ripe, Benita sits in her bedroom demanding cheese toasties and leaving the door open while she has sex with Lizzie's husband.

When Lizzie's husband says he wants a divorce, Lizzie and Sarah go to a bar, get very, very, drunk, find a gun and accidentally start killing everyone who has wronged them.

"We must remember to stop killing now!" Sarah says, at one point, before killing again.

Although it is the nature of the human brain to sort things into order, it's impossible to work out who is best here - Hynes or Davis. Both are so brilliant at embodying the millimetre-thick cheeriness - brittle as insect carapace - that grows over decades of deep, blood-and-bone pain. Hynes makes Sarah's eyes as sad as an Old English sheepdog's. Davis gives Lizzie a mouth of nervous twitching and breathless dry laughter. That they're doing all this to comic effect is to remind you, yet again, how comedy really is superior to all other genres.

As if this weren't enough, Davis and Hynes also play two teenage girls in the show - all lipgloss, "Babe!" and bird-like opportunism. In one shot, Davis sucks her thumb in the most sullen and aggressive manner imaginable, as an act of triumph over Lizzie. It's only one second long, but if you wanted to point at the most perfect vignette of a certain kind of self-obsessed, post-X Factor 21st-century teenage girl, it's all there.

However, despite being one of the most startlingly original pilots of the past few years, the BBC broadcast it at 11.45pm on a Saturday night on BBC Two - the kind of place I might hide a dead body, or the Ark of the Covenant, if I really didn't want them discovered.

Just to recap here: Hynes is the co-creator and co-star of Spaced, one of the most popular, groundbreaking and influential comedies of the past ten years; Davis is the writer and star of Nighty Night, regarded, again, as one of the best comedy series of the past ten years.

I will be honest with you - this has made my Patriarchy Alarm Bell go off. I can't imagine two male comedy performers, of equal stature, being shunted into this kind of slot, with so little publicity. Obviously the BBC is suffering from some odd manner of broadcasting shellshock, and commissioning only the most timid and inoffensive of programmes, in some manner of abject pre-emptive cringe at the prospect of an incoming Tory government. I get all that.

But, really, it's hard not to echo the comments of Simon Pegg on Twitter: "Jeez Beeb - grow a pair!!"

Married Single Other - ITV's huge new attempt to make "a new Cold Feet". More than six million tuned in for the first episode - proving that the simple expedient of covering every single flat surface in Britain with gigantic posters, urging people to watch the show, really has paid dividends.

The premise of the show is simple: love, huh? Men and women - coh. Life - complicated or what? With humans being what they are, if you had a drama centring on three women and three men, there's no end to the amount of platonic and romantic entanglements that could ensue.

Well obviously there is - simple mathematics tell us that it is 36. But don't let maths get in the way of meeting the characters. Here's Clint and Abbey - he's Ralf Little from Two Pints of Lager . . . , she's the model who might just inspire him to stop being a yuppie sex-pest. Here's Dickie and Babs - he's a bit Shameless, and does lots of online gambling with his shirt off, she's your classic blonde doormat all lined up to have an explosive affair by episode five. And here's Lillie and Eddie - the "beating heart" of the show. Eddie wants to marry Lillie - but Lillie works in a women's refuge, and so is inclined to say unfortunate things such as: "I don't need anyone else's fairytale! I have my own. I built my heaven right next to you, for all these years."

It's Lillie that's the problem here - played by Lucy "The Office" Davies in a series of cute faces, inverted commas, nose-wrinkling, tinkly-tonkly voices and sudden sarcasms, she makes Married Single Other play out like "Whatever Happened to Fearne Cotton?" I need not tell you what an unhappy moment for popular culture this is.

Rock & Chips - which one could either regard as the prequel to Only Fools and Horses or the prequel to The Green Green Grass, depending on how gloomy one wanted to feel about the state of commissioning in British television.

As a 90-minute pilot, the conceit was, presumably, to show us what one of Britain's best-loved TV characters - Del Boy - was like as a teenager; hanging out with a similarly acned Trigger, Denzil and Boycie. Kind of like they did with Muppet Babies, but with Cockneys. You Muppet Babies, perhaps.

The point of the pilot was that Joanie - Del's brassy, put-upon mother - had to have an affair in which she conceived Rodney, so that Del Boy has someone to shout "You plonker!" at if Rock & Chips goes to series.

To this end, Nicholas Lyndhurst turned up as Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, in order to impregnate Joanie with the character he will later play in Only Fools and Horses. Technically, it's quite hard to categorise what such an act comes under: self-incesting? It's kind of like a paradoxical, existential uroboros. Or, in a nutshell, "Eugh - kinky TARDIS Rodders-sex".

Intriguing time-travel ethics to one side, however, Rock & Chips was, at root, a feature-length dose of nothing: the period details of the Formica-topped tables holding more interest than wringing out, and re-using, these tired old characters from Peckham yet again. Please, BBC, let them die. I've got to square with you: they really weren't that interesting to begin with. They should all have just been background extras in Minder.

The All Star Impression Show was ITV1's big novelty entertainment show for Boxing Day, wherein celebrities did impressions of other celebrities - except for Joe Pasquale, who came on and was Joe Pasquale, in an oddly unconvincing manner.

For weeks before broadcast, ITV1 had promoted the show as if it were the magnificent glazed goose of its Christmas schedules, to be placed on our table to cries of "God bless you, good broadcasting sir!" In the event, The All Star Impression Show was essentially ITV1 bringing a roast cat to the dinner table, garnished with minced rat stuffing.

Eamonn Holmes as Elvis Presley kicked off proceedings. You need not ask which era Elvis he chose. This was not '68 Comeback Special; it was more 99 Flake Comeback Special. Indeed, in sunglasses and goitre, Holmes could have removed the cape and gone on to knock off both Roy Orbison and Carlos the Jackal, but sadly lacked the imaginative expanse to do so.

He was followed by what appeared to be Arsène Wenger doing a camp Jimmy Corkhill from Brookside - a frankly mind-blowing concept - but which perusal of the credits revealed to be a comedian called Stevie Riks doing Paul O'Grady. I hope that the confusion over this conveys some measure of how surreally awful the whole thing was, like a collection of your more lacklustre in-laws suddenly deciding to put on a revue, apparently written by their parents and occasionally studded with someone from Coronation Street.

Things reached their "WTF?" apogee with a sketch that involved Bobby Davro as Chris Tarrant, the wrinkles drawn on to his face with black felt-tip, and Les Dennis playing Gary Barlow as someone with no distinguishing physical or conversational features whatsoever, in a bath. Naked.

The skit revolved around Barlow trying to guess how Tarrant washed - "You gonna use your loofah?" - and peaked with Dennis rising, wholly naked, from the bath, genitals covered in a distressingly meagre slick of bath-foam. It may even have been Matey.

This, then, is why so many of us found ourselves at the bottom of the garden at 4am, sitting on a wet trampoline with a bad uncle. This, then, was Christmas.

You know what? - Rod Liddle eventually ruined this week. By Tuesday I was looking at everything on television, able only to wonder what Liddle would make of it. I'd been strapped into Liddle-goggles. What, for instance, is Liddle's stance on Russell Brand? Brand is 100 per cent white Anglo-Saxon - which presumably counts for at least ten Liddle points. Additionally, Brand talks like a souped-up Timothy Claypole from Rentaghost - which, in the absence of any more specific examples, one would presume is the kind of traditional, non-immigration-ruined British thing that Liddle would like. There's no modern rap-talk from Brand! It's all "I can't wait for the Great Exhibition of 1851!" this, and "Enjoy Pickwick's Patented Hair Pomade" the other.

However, a quick googling of Liddle's previous columns reveals that, in fact, he is down on Brand, big-time: "Smug, arrogant, over-paid, apparently stupid and not remotely entertaining." A fairly useful indicator to the rest of us that, given that Liddle hates him, Brand is probably awlright.

As the first real televisual access to Brand since last year's omni-demented Sachs-gate affair, The Road to Russell Brand: Skinned was an instructive insight into how Brand had dealt with it. Had he been a butterfly, broken on a wheel? Was he now tremulous, and wary?

"I was like - it's an exciting thing!" he beamed. "I'm in the middle of a storm - and I like it here! This is where I should always be!" Later on - referring to the incident on stage - he pointed out: "The thing is - I do worse than that every day."

Looking - with his big rack of teeth - very much like Mega Shark, the star of the recent B-movie Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Brand spent an hour answering Frank Skinner's questions, intercut with documentary footage of his recent publicity strike in America and appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Jay Leno Show.

Skinner's questioning didn't kick off with immense threat or weight: "I've always thought beautiful people couldn't be funny - but you've proved this wrong," was his first "question" to Brand. Somewhere, Jeremy Paxman must have felt a stabbing pain in his duodenum. But as the hour went on, Skinner lobbed in a couple of interesting observations - not least noting that, "I always found that, in order to be a womaniser, you had to turn down your compassion and humanity to get laid" - a proposition that Brand didn't have any real riposte to.

"It takes a lot of discipline - more than I have - not to go 'I will f*** you, you know'," he beamingly explained, over footage of fans screaming his name.

Perhaps the most amazing revelation in Skinnned, however, was neither sexual nor centred on controversy. Instead, it was that Brand has someone on tour with him to do his hair and make-up. Darling, I adore how you look but, honestly - ratting up your hair and applying two tramlines of kohl like that could just as easily be achieved by someone in security, or catering.