Clive James

So this is the time to point out to the furiously shouting Charlie that he himself is part of the entertainment on the box and that it therefore can't be all bad. He has a way of putting things that makes a funfair out of the apocalypse.

BBC Northern Ireland has just turned out one of the best documentary dramas I have seen in years: Wodehouse in Exile (BBC Four), the story of PG Wodehouse and the calamitous moment in his life when he broadcast on German radio early in the Second World War.

During the huge Comic Relief production Funny for Money (BBC One), the first segment was hosted by Claudia Winkleman and some guy. Try as I might, I couldn't remember Some Guy's name even after I wrote it down, but that could have been because I was so knocked out with the way Claudia looked. At first glance, she looked like a visitor from some planet where the women have beautiful legs and no eyes. But at second glance, I spotted that she did indeed have a pair of eyes somewhere behind her fringe, and at third glance I noticed that she was wearing a perfectly judged frock.

Here were the British showing the Americans how to do it. All we need now is a bit of confidence to go with the manifestly superior sanity. Unfortunately such confidence is hard to come by, because the Americans wield a heavy cultural influence over the rest of us even when they are doing something so glaringly wrong as to load an over-glamorous outfit onto an averagely glamorous woman. It's almost 70 years since the Second World War and the British are still in thrall to that postwar mentality by which it was taken to be self-evident that only the Yanks could build desirable cars.

Charlie Brooker has been kind to me in print, so I must be careful not to be too kind about him, lest people suspect that I am dishing out a quid pro quo. On the downside, his weekly show behind a desk (Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, BBC Two) sometimes makes it look as though he wants to eat the desk in his anger at the world.

But his larger dramatic creations reveal a Swiftian intelligence that is quite unusual when translated into an updated, high tech, electronic (squrrk!) field. There is quite a lot of squrrk! in Black Mirror. He wants you to know that your attention is being zapped into lightning trips from one field of reality to another.

The main reality in the latest show seemed to be that a helpless young woman was on the run from dozens of zombie-type vigilantes: shades of A Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, etc.

But (squrrk!) not so fast. Towards the end it turns out that she is really the victim of a deadly game. With her wiped brain - Brooker is fond of the idea of the human mind being annihilated by television - she is being made to experience the suffering she caused when she tortured a child. But did she? Are the organizers of the game (see, as Brooker undoubtedly has, The Game, with Michael Douglas) normal people like us, at last getting the chance to inflict a just punishment that the psycho criminal will actually feel? Or what?

Doubts remain as the soundtrack says squrrk! Brooker used to be a companion at arms for Chris Morris but it is starting to look as if he, Brooker, has a scope all his own, and more powerful for being less parodic. He doesn't just make fun of television, which even I can do. He can see the fractures in life itself, as Swift could. On top of that he has the great virtue of having seen everything and yet not being derivative. His desk-eating savagery is too heartfelt for that.

All performers, and especially comedians, would like to have credibility. This was the subject of Funny Business (BBC Two), a show in which I took a personal interest, because I once harboured the illusion that I could do after-dinner speeches and commercials and thereby pick up some easy money.

Until recently, straight actors lost credibility if they did commercials. Sir Laurence Olivier did a Polaroid commercial, but only on the understanding that it would never be screened in the UK. Today, however, George Clooney hustles coffee and Brad Pitt barks for Chanel No5. The money might go to charity, but it still counts as a fast buck. Nevertheless, the actors get away with it.

For the comedians it has always been a hard choice. A commercial will look like slumming unless it is funny enough to be thought of as part of the comedian's repertoire. Another question mark hangs over the corporate event appearance, where months of big bucks can be earned in a single night. But people who haven't paid to see you, and who are sitting at round tables which ensure that many of them are facing the wrong way, are a soul-destroying prospect.

Intelligent comic operatives such as Barry Cryer, John Lloyd and John Cleese were united in the opinion that the business opportunities form part of the career. But I can say from experience that it hurts when it goes wrong. I once did a big, expensive set of plugs for Australian Telecom in the very year that their opposition came out with a better product. And the money wasn't all that easy. There is a small hill of red dirt somewhere near Alice Springs that is flatter now because of the number of times I had to walk up it.

Thanks to the success that was The Last Leg during the 2012 Paralympics - no less a critic than Clive James said it was almost the best bit of the whole shebang - genial Aussie comedian Adam Hills returns to present a round-up of the week's events in the news. He's joined again by stand-up Josh Widdicombe and sportswriter Alex Brooker. Doubtless their easy-going chemistry and quick quippery will snag them an even sturdier audience than the one they earned over the summer.

Hugh Bonneville was at the centre of my favourite dramatic creation of the year, Twenty Twelve. His character, Ian Fletcher, was head of the Olympic Deliverance Commission.

"Deliverance" was a typical word for members of the commission to use. Throughout the series, the level of debased language was high, if you follow me.

Until the actual Olympics arrived and ruined everything by being delivered rather better than the show had led us to expect, the bunch of blunderers portrayed by the show looked and sounded as if they could have stayed up there forever. My favourite cretin on the squad was Siobhan Sharp, played by Jessica Hynes. Some critics thought that her hooting patter was unlikely but it matched a lot of the PR stuff to be heard in what I am increasingly reluctant to call real life.

Unlike any American writers for the networks, the writers who assemble the crammed and hurtling script for The Thick of It have a licence to delve into the cesspool of the English language. "Dark s---," said Malcolm Tucker, "builds up." Tucker, as played by Peter Capaldi, is in command of an eloquence unheard in British drama since Congreve, but the eloquence is all filthy.

In the leading role of Best Possible Taste (BBC Four) Oliver Lansley was good at copying Kenny Everett's funny voices but this only reminded you that the star was at his funniest when talking straight. "I love you," he told his wife, "but I fancy Burt Reynolds." His muse, the improbably beautiful Cleo Rocos, wasn't in the script. When I saw the two of them together I thought: he's done it, he's reduced sex to a Platonic ideal, the lucky swine. Actually, of course, he was wretched.

Malcolm was back in The Thick of It (BBC Two) and ordering a soft drink. "I'll have a f------ Fanta." What I love about him is how, since he swears so much, nobody else has to swear at all. They do anyway, but they aren't in his league.