Christopher Stevens

Review: Gavin & Stacey Christmas special

Nothing could bring a lump to the throat like this moment.

Johnny Vegas and Sian Gibson worked gamely for laughs as they investigated a string of murders at the Shady Creek caravan park in Dial M For Middlesbrough (Gold).

The first victim was run through with a swingball pole. The next two were liquidised and served in a ragu. Jason Donovan, as the camp entertainer, was brained with a boule.

The humour was as broad as Benidorm and, for those who are missing the high jinks at that Spanish holiday resort, it delivered some cheesy chuckles.

But you couldn't die laughing at it.

Review: Gavin & Stacey Christmas special

Tidy! It's like your favourite relatives turning up at Christmas.

Interview: Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel

A fresh festive fix of Eric & Ern: Missing those Christmas specials? Then an uncannily accurate homage to the comedy legends and their best-loved gags is for you.

One of the highlights of this old-fashioned variety hour is the segment where Michael lets himself into a celebrity's house by night (the front door is always conveniently open) and bursts into the bedroom to play pranks on the stunned victim.

Michael would be well advised not to try this game if he ever takes his show to the U.S., since most American celebs sleep with a shotgun over the bedstead and a handgun under the pillow.

Judge Rob Rinder was the guest this time and, though he was characteristically grumpy, he didn't attempt to shoot the intruder. Oddly, he appeared to have a bullet-proof glass balustrade around the bottom of his bed, so perhaps guns give him nightmares.

The best bit of the show is still the game in which Michael borrows a celeb's phone and sends a cheeky message to all their contacts. It gets funnier every time.

Tim Minchin, a dazzlingly clever comic songwriter who might be far more popular if his humour wasn't so aggressive and caustic, wrote and stars in the eight-part series.

He plays Lucky, a gaunt-eyed drinker who is trying to drive across Australia towing a piano, to see his terminally ill mother. His plans come adrift when, after mixing booze and medication, he crashes his car on a remote scrubland road.

His piano isn't damaged, but the 16-year-old driver of the other vehicle is. She's broken her wrist. Lucky offers to drive her to hospital...and from the moment he wrestles his seatbelt into place, we know they're going to be stuck with each other.

If the idea isn't too original, the dialogue is. It's jagged, fast and unsentimental, with a tendency to spiral off into philosophical arguments.

Though it's frustrating to see new comedy locked away on a pay-to-view channel, there's no way the BBC would have made this show.

It's very...Australian.

The police in Guilt (BBC2) are also showing no interest in getting to the bottom of the murky maelstrom of crimes . . . murder, fraud and now money-laundering. It doesn't help that one of the detectives is in the pay of the city's kingpin (Bill Paterson).

'I'm a businessman now, but a businessman who in the past committed significant amounts of extreme violence,' he growled at dodgy lawyer Max (Mark Bonnar). Bonnar is at the dark heart of this crime drama. He conveys such brittle, superficial charm we can't help guessing at what festers beneath.

All comedy in the script has leached away. There was nothing funny about the dockyard beating meted out to private eye Kenny. Like Max and his brother Jake, we've been lured into something much more dangerous than we expected.

The Cockfields: the Royles with a middle class makeover

Thank gawd it's not just my family, then. The Cockfields (Gold), a three-part sitcom about a bloke taking his girlfriend home to meet his parents, is crammed with lines so true to life, it sometimes felt like a documentary.

Guilt: bonny murder thriller with surreal twists

Guilt (BBC2), starring Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives as two Edinburgh brothers who can't bear the sight of each other, is a murder thriller that might have escaped from the imagination of Billy Connolly. Convoluted, paranoid and hypnotic, it was also mordantly funny.

The fake news in Motherland (BBC2) was that the new mum at the school gates, Meg (Tanya Moodie), was a superwoman.

Apparently an international business consultant, she struck deals in multiple languages on her mobile while raising five well-adjusted children and enjoying a blissful marriage.

Naturally, Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) loathed her. 'Where's your secret sadness?' she fumed. But this is Motherland, where parenthood is the seventh circle of hell and every day when you haven't strangled one of your little darlings can be counted as a success.

No surprises, then, when Meg turned out to be a raging alcoholic who regarded hijacking a bus and confrontations with the police as ordinary hazards of a good binge.

Even if this comedy is a trifle cynical and earthy for some tastes, it's always worth it for the deadpan world-weariness of Liz (Diane Morgan) -- who reckons the chief compensation for being a single mother is getting ten per cent off at Dorothy Perkins.