Clive James

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.

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.