Christopher Stevens

For sheer flamboyance, there's no beating tubby hairdresser Kenneth (Tony Maudsley), who flounced into the sea as Benidorm (ITV) returned.

He was trying to swim back to the Solana hotel, from an island off the Costa Blanca coast, but only his necklace was washed ashore. Of the rest, nothing was found, not even his silver posing briefs. If he doesn't turn up, it's a clever way to write his character out of the show -- with the possibility of a comeback one day.

Nigel Havers. as the smarmy dentist taking over Kenneth's salon, is smoothly amusing, and the wonderful Janine Duvitski as elderly swinger Jacqueline is back.

But most of the best-loved Benidorm regulars have long since departed, and the show has a decrepit air, like a cheap hotel at the tail-end of the season.

Full marks, though, to a hilarious cameo from Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley, sending himself up as a shameless narcissist churning out the band's hits at a wedding. That was pure Gold.

There's plenty of slapstick, too: Benton does it well, stumbling over his own feet and mugging madly when he doesn't have a line. Fans of Midsomer Murders will settle in straight away and, with so many grim, grinding crime dramas clogging up the evening schedules, it's worth setting the recorder for this one.

Left stony-faced by Cleese? Try bittersweet gem Mum

We all laugh at different things. Opinions were sharply divided, in my home and probably millions of others, over John Cleese's new sitcom Hold The Sunset last Sunday -- blissfully traditional, or wheezingly out-dated, depending on your taste. Mum (BBC2) tackles identical subject matter: the recently widowed woman, not yet ready for her bath chair, whose hopes of new romance with an old friend are constantly obstructed by her selfish son and the rest of her feckless family.

Cleese splutters and trots around like an elderly ostrich with high blood pressure. Fans who were hoping to see a return of Basil Fawlty discovered instead that he has matured into a relative of the mad old Major Gowen, played by Ballard Berkeley. It was inevitable, really.

Hold The Sunset is an old-fashioned sitcom, a cross between One Foot In The Grave and Ronnie Corbett's Sorry. It remains to be seen whether audiences still have an appetite for laboured slapstick where ageing men get into scrapes and women cluck over them.

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the performers who also write the darkly comic playlets of Inside No. 9 (BBC2), seem to actively invite criticism, with the wild variety of their stories.

Last week it was a pastiche of Shakespeare, packed with toilet jokes, that I found tiresome. This time, it was a heartfelt homage to the end-of-the-pier double acts that both men adored as children. They played Cheese and Crackers, a fourth-rate version of Morecambe and Wise: 'We weren't even as good as Mike and Bernie Winters.'

The characters were rich, constantly revealing new depths as they bickered their way through a reunion rehearsal -- and the twist at the end came like the turn of a knife.

Because the subject matter and the style of each episode are so variable, there's always a touch of trepidation about sitting down to watch Inside No. 9. The failures wouldn't seem quite so disappointing, if the triumphs were not so superb.

Grandpa's Great Escape review

Jennifer Saunders didn't so much steal her scenes in Grandpa's Great Escape (BBC1) as thwack them over the head with a cosh and stuff them in a bag marked 'Swag'.

We've seen this nasty treatment meted out to Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, Tommy Cooper and many more -- and now, in a miserable distortion of the truth called Eric, Ernie And Me (BBC4), to Morecambe and Wise.

This hour-long drama was based on the life of Eddie Braben, who wrote much of the duo's material in the Seventies when they were at their peak. But according to this version, Eric & Ernie were nobodies before Braben arrived -- rotten material, no rapport, behaved like strangers on stage.

That's complete nonsense. They were a superstar double act, who had starred together in a series of films. Even the Beatles clamoured to be on their show.

Braben was a brilliant gag-writer, who took the boys to new heights. But it was wrong to claim he plucked the Andre Previn/'Andrew Preview' sketch out of the air: the raw version was penned in the Sixties by Eric & Ernie's former writers, Sid Green and Dick Hills.

The whole thing was a depressing business, obsessed with Braben's breakdowns and bouts of mental illness. Writer Neil Forsyth seemed to be reproaching us: see what agonies this poor man suffered to make us laugh.

Most scurrilous of all was the way it portrayed Eric as a manipulative, cowardly tyrant, who bullied everyone around him. That bears no relation to any description of the man that I've ever read.

For an honest depiction of Morecambe and Wise, we had an hour of cine film shot by the boys themselves, in Eric & Ernie's Home Movies (BBC2) -- though why this was aired on a different channel was not explained.

Some of the best material was the very earliest, from a Fifties panto season. We saw the duo doing slapstick routines on stage, knocking each other down and riding about (for reasons not specified) in a pram.

Other reels showed them in New York, hoping to conquer America, and touring Australia -- as well as larking about on family holidays and at home.

The tenderness that Eric felt for his children, and the attention Ernie lavished on his wife Doreen, shone through.

Because the stars were behind the lens most of the time, the really interesting moments were few, with much padding in between. And it wasn't clear why the home movies stopped in the Sixties. Is there more to come?

Last Christmas the Mischief Threatre Comnpany they staged a delightfully silly version of Peter Pan, but this year's attempt, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong (BBC1), was dragged under by the weight of its own jokes.

The set-up, which had the pranksters kidnapping Sir Derek Jacobi during a 'live TV production' of Scrooge, was far too convoluted. So was the dialogue, which included great slabs lifted from Dickens.

The running gags didn't so much run as limp. There was very little to take the audience by surprise: most of the jokes announced themselves in advance by telegram.

With Dame Diana Rigg narrating, it was a starry affair, and the cast never lacked energy. They flung themselves at every pratfall.

But there was no need to make it so complicated. Sometimes, a custard pie is just a custard pie.

This Christmas special bubble of nostalgia - charmingly outdated even when Ronnie Barker was the stuttering shopkeeper and Granville was a tousled lad in a tank-top - isn't so much a sitcom as half an hour of small talk.

The assorted widows and divorcees of the street met, as they always do, around a kitchen table, to exchange gossip about any available middle-aged men.

Granville's son Leroy (James Baxter) was on the pull as ever, this time chatting up a local vegan lass waving a 'meat is murder' placard outside the shop.

One day it'll be Leroy in the brown apron, battling the dyspeptic cash register and diddling customers out of pennies. But in the outside world, the ants will have control.