Chris Geere

Laughs were provided by Sky One's Trollied, which returns for its third series. The joy of Trollied is that it has so many characters that the majority of the scenes only last a couple of minutes.

The main plot of this series seems to be the introduction of Richard France (Chris Geere), a strategist who is aiming to modernise Valco using the Warrington branch as his tester store. Obviously Richard's bold ideas, including his clothing choices, will inevitably clash with the more traditional views of manager Gavin (Jason Watkins) and his assistant manager Julie (Jane Horrocks).

Elsewhere, we are treated more to the tedious love story between butcher Kieran (Nick Blood) and checkout girl Katie (Chanel Creswell). It seems that the now divorced Kieran is in a depressive state while Katie has finally realised that he's the perfect man for her. Luckily this romantic story isn't dwelt upon too long and we get plenty from our favourite comic characters including head butcher Andy (Mark Addy) and senior citizen deli assistant Margaret (Rita May).

It is these established characters that get the best gags including the now romantically linked Colin (Carl Rice) and Lisa (Beverly Rudd) whose sexual exploits provide some of the funniest moments in the episode.

I'm still not quite sure what to make of weird fishmonger Ray (Adeel Akhtar) and his new apprentice Dave (Danny Kirrane) as I didn't find their characters to be fully-formed.

Ultimately not much has changed in the world of Trollied and I think I like it that way. The jokes are still as funny as ever while the performances from Watkins and Horrocks are great especially when we saw how proud Gavin and Julie were of their summertime display.

Though I don't think this will quite reach the heights of Season 2, due to the fact that Stephanie Beacham has now left the show, Trollied continues to be a funny sketch-like sitcom with plenty of well-rounded characters.

Back to Valco in Warrington for series three, and the staff are going through the motions. Trollied's sketchy sitcom format, cutting from one section of the supermarket to the next without worrying much about crafting a story, feels a bit worn when we're watching the familiar characters: weird Leighton, lustful Colin and Lisa, and the Tim/Dawn dynamic of Katie and newly divorced Kieran. Here to shake things up, in the story and the show, is Chris Geere as Richard France, a berk in flip-flops who's the new Valco management guru. But a jargon-spouting strategist isn't a fresh enough comic idea, either.

Pete Versus Life (Channel 4, also Friday), a new five-part comedy drama, took one clever idea and ran amok with it. If life is like sport, then where are the commentators? And so we had Pete (Rafe Spall), an ordinary - that is to say lazy, selfish and intermittently very stupid - twentysomething. And we also had anchorman Colin (Simon Greenall) along with wise-cracking former footballer Terry (Ian Kirkby), who commented on Pete's ups and downs as if they were part of some huge, slam-dunking sport event.

This format was funniest when the pundits used flashy graphics to illustrate run-of-the-mill facts: a profile sheet on Pete's nemesis, Jake (Daniel Ings), which revealed that he could grow a full beard in three days; or a pie chart showing an irritating character's favourite topics of conversation.

In the first episode, Pete inadvertently impressed a girl when he was lying about his commitment to green causes, and had to tie himself up in knots of dishonesty to keep her interested. He was helped - and hindered - by an assortment of friends, including his flatmate Kurt (Chris Geere), who has a rigidly proprietorial attitude towards his Weetabix. It was all funny enough, though the punditry gimmick was at times pushed to the limit. Surely they're not going to follow Pete and his girlfriend into the bedroom, I thought, cringing. But they did, complete with the inevitable performance chart. Schoolboys across the land rejoiced.

Still, this was a perfectly decent comedy, with the added extra of a satire on sporting hyperbole served up on the side. But at the end of the day it will be interesting to see whether this combination has enough legs to last the full 180 minutes.

Come Dine With Me has Dave Lamb. Big Brother has Marcus Bentley. Match Of The Day had John Motson and this brilliant new show has Colin King and Terry McIlroy - the world's very first sitcommentators.

Played by Simon Greenall and Ian Kirkby these two are the gimmick that turns what would have been a reasonably amusing but fairly predictable sitcom into a work of utter genius.

With meaningless statistics, on-screen pie-charts and action replays they provide a hilarious blow-by-blow commentary on sports reporter Pete (played by Rafe Spall), whose love life amounts to a series of own goals and sendings-off.

In tonight's pilot episode Pete's latest potential conquest is a girl named Chloe, who is under the impression that he cares passionately about the environment (he doesn't). And we meet all his friends - best mate Rob who's engaged to an excruciating blonde named Anna and housemate Kurt, a Zimbabwean played by Waterloo Road's Chris Geere, who's obsessed with spreading the word about safe sex.

Most promising of all is Pete's nemesis Jake (Daniel Ings) - a dashingly handsome bearded eco-warrior who has just come back from watching the North Pole melt.

And here's another statistic for you: did you know Simon Greenall is also the voice of Aleksandr Orlov in the Compare The Meerkat commercials? Make this one a regular Friday night fixture.