Catherine Tate

Making the jump to TV is this Radio 4 staple in which Dave Gorman and a celebrity guest consider 'genius' inventions from the public. Radio is probably the most logical home for the simple premise but this actually works quite well if you view it as some kind of idiot's version of Dragon's Den. In this series opener, Gorman and guest Catherine Tate consider a bus whose destination is decided on by public vote, and a man who wants 100m-high shoes for a very specific purpose.

Not sure if this new show - despite the title - is genius. It's entertaining enough but it feels a bit wrong. Every week a celeb guest listens as loonies present a bizarre idea and then they judge whether it is genius or not. Host Dave Gorman is good though and this week's guest, Catherine Tate, gamely takes part. It's like a very silly Dragons' Den.

If you aren't familiar with the Radio 4 series, the best way of describing this format is Dragons' Den meets Room 101.

Members of the public pitch their ideas for useful inventions or innovations to the host Dave Gorman and a celebrity guest - tonight it's Catherine Tate - who then debate with increasing hilarity whether their idea is truly worthy of the label genius.

To give you some idea, the sort of brainwaves that got the thumbs-up on the radio in the past ranged from the eminently practical - selling socks in threes, rather than in pairs - to the surreal: running the House of Commons to the same rules as the panel show Just A Minute.

The advantage of TV, of course, is that we can see what prototypes of these ideas might look like and get some idea of how well - or not - they would work.

For instance, a bus whose journey gets decided by a democratic vote by the passengers sounds ludicrous enough on paper but, in practice, it's completely round the bend.

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BBC1's The Armstrong and Miller Show doesn't go in for easy catchphrases - the emphasis is on recurring characters and slightly more sophisticated comedy, like the pair of Second World War pilots speaking in upper class accents but with the vocabulary and attitude of Catherine Tate's petulent schoolgirl Lauren.

The situations and the characters are so familiar and low-key that watching them with the sound down you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd tuned into a slightly dull set of documentaries. But pay attention to the script and you find yourself transported to a different world where everything is inverted. This show has been made with a great deal of pace and visual panache.

Big Train seems to be achieving belated cult status. There are several reasons for the delayed reaction, perhaps most notably the cast's subsequent successes: in the second series from 2002, which is showing this weekend, Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg and Green Wing's Mark Heap are joined by a pre-fame Catherine Tate and a pre-EastEnders Tracy-Ann Oberman. But it is the off-the-wall humour of the writers, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, the creators of Father Ted, that really makes this one comedy repeat worth devoting a significant part of your weekend to.

Quando, Quando, Quando (Radio 4), a new comedy series set in a hair salon, at least has the benefit of that energetic cartoon style that has become so popular in Radio 4 comedy over the past few years - bathetic narrator, comic sound effects, jokey little vignettes. In episode two, the salon is overrun with literally lousy schoolchildren, and solves the problem by the liberal use of sheep dip. Fatuous stuff, but the gabby assistant played by Catherine Tate is perfect.