Clive James

Devised by and starring Adil Ray, Citizen Khan (BBC One) has been greeted as an all-time stinker. Is it really that bad? I'm afraid so, but it has its moments. The leading character is a Pakistani. Amiable and generous with his time, he is ready to have a long conversation with a cold caller until it turns out that the cold call is coming from India. He bangs down the phone, to a convulsive response from the audience.

Mind you, the audience responds convulsively to anything. At one stage Mr Ray did nothing but walk out of the kitchen to answer the phone in the hall, and he was met by a ripple of laughter. Why? No, the show is dreadful. But it might not be hopeless. There is room for it to grow. It might even turn into something as richly informative as the movie East is East, although for that to happen someone will have to get some writing talent from somewhere.

A sign of a strong television programme is that the supplementary programmes are strong too. Taken as a whole, the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics was very good, but almost the best part of it was The Last Leg, the discussion show at the end of each day.

The show was conducted by a droll Australian called Adam Hills and it solved the problem of how to talk about disabilities in a straightforward manner without being crass. Which is not to say that Hills was incapable of being crude, but he knew how to time it. On the day that Oscar Pistorius, so renowned for his sportsmanship, beefed embarrassingly about blade-lengths after losing in the 200 metres, Hills played the tape of the interview and then said, "Holy s---balls." It seemed exactly the right expression.

Former Phoenix Nights star and comedian Paddy McGuinness hosts the last in the series of the entertainment panel show in his usual holiday-rep style. Treading ground previously pioneered by our TV critic Clive James and Chris Tarrant in the Eighties and Nineties, the quiz focuses on wacky news stories and video clips from around the world. Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords) and Rufus Hound (Celebrity Juice) head up two celebrity teams. Their guests this week are David Hasselhoff, Louie Spence and Coleen Nolan.

Such is the dearth of new programming during the Olympics that I am obliged to review Mad Mad World, a show well into its run which I had rather hoped to avoid ever setting eyes on.

My low expectations were met in full. Mad Mad World is yet another comedy panel show in an already saturated market that is more than happy to rehash other formats rather than attempt anything microscopically different. They even steal the funny buzzer noises as pioneered by QI.

The basic premise creaks with unoriginality and old age - aren't foreigners and their television shows funny? Clive James certainly thought so, three decades ago. Clips are exhumed, many already viral on the internet, and two teams make purportedly witty comments about them. Several of the rounds feature still photographs from news stories, which rather defeats the object of the exercise and suggests that any attempt at quality control was long since abandoned back in the pub where the idea was originally hatched.

Paddy McGuinness is the perfectly competent host, and the panellists make a decent fist of trying to make the show look unscripted. A sliver of spontaneity did infiltrate proceedings courtesy of guest Stacey Solomon, who was endearingly ditzy throughout, but even she could do little to lift the suffocating miasma of complacency engulfing the whole sorry enterprise.
"What is unique about this Venus de Milo?" asks McGuinness of a peculiar looking statue.

"Is it made of shit?" replies team captain Rufus Hound.

It was. But it certainly wasn't the only thing that evening.

The first episode of the current seasonette of the wonderful Twenty Twelve (BBC Two) was called Catastrophisation and hit the screen just before the story came out about the Olympics security force being short of several thousand people. The people who make the show must be aware that reality is always going to beat them, but still they plug away, creating, with the Head of Deliverance and his team, the funniest ensemble since Dad's Army. Hugh Bonneville plays Ian Fletcher with a dead pan, yet his eyes are full of the awareness that the only sane course is to despair. When one of the team shot him with the starting pistol rigged to fire live ammo I fell at the same angle as he did.

That idea was given extra emphasis by You Cannot Be Serious! ([c]ITV1]/c]), an excellent one-man show from Alistair McGowan, who imitated everyone concerned with Euro 2012, and managed to abet his imitative skill with some excellent writing.

Blessed with a rich basic idea, Episodes (BBC Two) forges on. The basic idea is that the Americans are copying a British hit comedy show and, of course, changing everything. The British writers, played by Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, are on the spot in LA to help with the task of butchering their own creation. Matt LeBlanc, always the funniest of the men in Friends, plays the randy American star. There is nothing and nobody I have so far mentioned that I can't laugh at, not even Stephen Mangan, who, after Dirk Gently, had moved, I thought, irretrievably into the category of Not Funny. The trick with Episodes is that it satirises the Yanks while accurately borrowing all their best precision. Television about television is hard to do. Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a sprawling mess compared to Episodes. There is an advantage to keeping the premise simple.

As its latest season came to an end, Twenty Twelve (BBC Two) just got better and better.

I tried to like Dirk Gently (BBC Four) but it was hard to find the humour. As with the spoof show Cricklewood Greats, which came and went a few weeks ago leaving a sense that even Peter Capaldi can sometimes waste his time, a great deal of care and attention didn't add up to a single gag. It could be that, as the years pass, one falls out of love with the spoof form itself; perhaps because everything has been done. On one of the off-world channels last week I got another chance to see the movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and it was as impressive as ever. It had infinite resources from the film archive and they were deployed with tact and cunning. But even then, I didn't laugh much.

For any show that tries to do the same sort of thing but with less wit I can barely summon up enough interest to see it through. The antipathy has got something to do with the spoof form itself. It is always as if the spoofers had spent years getting ready, paying the wrong kind of attention; they are like practical jokers, forever looking for a way in. On the other hand, The Comic Strip bunch a few years back did some good stuff, and a spoof sequence was always the highlight of the French and Saunders shows. When I recall those two in their spoof mode, however, I also recall that The Two Ronnies were only ever disastrously dull in their Piggy Malone number.

On the other hand, Harry Hill's TV Burp (ITV1), so often a festival of inspired raillery, did a rap version of Downton Abbe that was dead accurate except for being far too exciting. The essence of Downton is that every character must half turn to the camera in order to express an emotion, then turn away. Speed destroys the pace, as it were.