Christopher Stevens

Daily Mail review

This tribute was crammed with clips of Tony Hancock's brilliance, from his radio days in the Fifties, when he had matinee-idol looks, to his dishevelled and slurred performance at the Royal Festival Hall 15 years later.

David Walliams' new show is a masterclass in comedy

Hurrah! An old school sitcom: No wobbly cameras or vile language - just real characters and good jokes. David Walliams' new show is a masterclass in comedy.

The horribly-named I'm Spazticus was a hidden camera, fool-the-public format using actors with disabilities.

One of the first 'jokes' on the prank show saw a job applicant going for an interview. The receptionist warned him that the interviewer could be a 'Little Hitler' - and behind the desk, there was a man about 3ft 6in high, with his fringe greased sideways and a toothbrush moustache.

His phone rang: he grabbed it and started arguing about the time of his next appointment. 'I said nine! Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein!' Then he slammed his head on the desk, while the jobseeker sat and looked anxious.

It was witless and predictable and pointless. And it was a ghastly demonstration of the chasm that has opened up between classic television comedy and the guff that is churned out now.

Somebody at Channel 4 obviously thinks dwarfs are hilarious, because they featured in lots of 'pranks'. Six of them were carrying a coffin through the streets with a floral tribute spelling 'Happy' in red and white carnations.

A passer-by, a gangly lad about 6ft tall, was roped in to be a pall-bearer. He obviously didn't imagine that one of Snow White's seven dwarfs had passed away. He was just bored and passing the time. Meanwhile, a woman with one arm was trying to persuade minor celebs from TOWIE and The X Factor to join a campaign against prosthetic limbs being transplanted from chimpanzees.

She had film on an iPad of a man with a monkey's arm attached to his elbow. Even the notoriously dim Frankie Cocozza didn't seem particularly convinced by this. But if you're a reject from a TV talent contest who hasn't had a headline for months, you'll probably give any publicity a try.

Even less effort had gone into Boom Town [than I'm Spazticus], which posed as a reality show but carried a disclaimer: 'Some scenes have been enhanced.'

Here was a bunch of unappealing show-offs, acting up for the camera. A self-proclaimed 'white witch' invited an estate agent to value his home, and brewed up a magic potion; a pasty-faced rapper tried to talk in ghetto street-jive; a married couple re-enacted scenes from films, badly.

They were delusional, they were attention-seeking, they were socially inept. They weren't genuine eccentrics.

And whatever else these awful programmes were, they couldn't be called comedy.

This show's got something for everyone... except laughs

This surgically engineered sitcom made just one slip in its pilot episode. It forgot to leave room for the jokes.

A toe-curling date was the centrepiece of Love And Marriage, when retired lollipop lady Pauline (Alison Steadman) went for a drink and a movie with widowed teacher Peter (Bruce Alexander).

We know that Pauline is a dating novice - she's only been out with one man, and she's been married to him for 40 years. But last week she left him, and moved in with her flighty sister (Celia Imrie), who really should have explained some dating basics. Such as, if your hubby phones you during the date, don't answer. And if you do answer, don't have a blazing row. And if you do have a blazing row, remember that your date can hear everything you're saying about him.

The show is fragmenting into a collection of sketches, starring energetic but two-dimensional characters. The most interesting is daughter Heather (Niky Wardley), boiling with jealousy if her younger husband even speaks to another woman.

There's a sort of charm about Pauline's car-mad husband Ken, too. When Heather tells him she's just seen her mum being whisked off for her date in Peter's flashy E-Type Jaguar, Ken looks torn between feeling hurt and being impressed. 'E-Type? What year?' he asks.

Pauline's sister is thoroughly dislikable - the sort of shallow, brittle schemer that Imrie plays so well. Envious for decades of her sibling's happy marriage, she's delighted to help break it up. 'You've left a world of pain, not a man,' she assures Pauline.

This is the sort of comedy-drama that signals its 60-something characters are Being Free and Living Life, by having them blow up a space hopper and bounce round the living room. But like Dates [Channel 4's drama], it needs to start tying its story strands together.

It's the Steptoe & Son of the gay & thespian community

There are perfectionists at work on this show. At the last minute, the title was cut back to one simple word: Vicious. It's more direct, and more truthful - because of the two old queens on this show, one of them is a bit of a sweetheart.

The Job Lot is set in a busy West Midlands Job Centre and will focus on the relationships between the people that work there and the people that don't work there, or anywhere else for that matter.

This fly-on-the-wall comedy, set in a Birmingham employment centre, will take a little time to bed in, while we get to know the manager on the brink of a nervous breakdown (Sarah Hadland from Miranda) and the frustrated arts graduate on the dole counter (TV veteran Russell Tovey).

The obstreperous Angela (Jo Enright) was instantly recognisable. She's one of the awkward squad as only British public services can make 'em. Refusing to open the office until exactly 9am, handing out the wrong forms on purpose, and cutting hunks off a block of cheddar with a pair of office scissors: Angela was perfectly observed.

A genius of observational humour was celebrated in Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian, reminding us he was so much more than a stand-up comic. Allen, who had his own jokes-and-sketches show, Dave Allen At Large, on BBC2 in the Seventies and Eighties, was a one-man crusade against the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland (he labelled the nuns who taught him at school 'Gestapo in drag') and caused such offence that he used to get death threats.

It's incredible the BBC ever had the nerve to screen his papal striptease, with the Holy Father high-kicking on the steps of St Peter's. And it's a downright travesty that, because Allen didn't want to see his shows constantly repeated, they are never replayed at all.

Whatever some 40-year-old contract says, it has to be torn up. Dave Allen is too funny to be forgotten.

Nothing's funnier than middle-class sitcoms

Let's take the middle classes out of sitcom, says BBC1 controller Danny Cohen. The prospect of a cultural revolution in sitcom is not reassuring. Without the middle classes, much of our funniest TV ceases to exist.