Dan Tetsell

For this particular instalment, Jones found himself casing the catwalk as a professional photographer at a Milan fashion shoot. Despite being pretty lousy at the job - his only relevant experience was taking pictures of animals - he still ended up jetting off to South America to snap an eccentric and often angry Miss Venezuela.

To attempt to explain what happened next would be far too ambitious, let's just say that Jones' adventure featured encounters with Big Foot and a tribe of eco terrorists, and that was after he discovered what going for a Brazilian really meant.

The joy of the programme was in the writing, particularly the running gags, and the way it was performed by Jones and the cast, which included Tom Goodman-Hill, Dan Tetsell, Ingrid Oliver and Ben Willbond.

Having starred as government advisor Ollie Reader in the brilliant political satire The Thick of It, Chris Addison now gets a leg-up on the comedy ladder with his own prime-time sitcom.

Addison helms this likeable, madcap comedy as Dr Alex Beenyman, head of the Arnolfini Research Laboratory at St Dunstan's University. Naturally, not a single member of the lab has the first clue how to do their job. Professor John Mycroft (Hyperdrive's Geoff McGivern) has just spent the laboratory's budget on a huge statue of himself on horseback, slaying dragons.

Dr Beenyman's principal concern is that his white lab coat has just been dyed pink. He worries this makes him look 'gay', though his nitwitted colleague Brian Lalumaca (Dan Tetsell) and his hapless Brummie lab assistant Cara McIlvenny (Jo Enright) insist it's actually his hair that looks gay. Pandemonium is triggered by the visit of a Russian geneticist, Dr Kyrtistyges (pronounced 'Curtis Stigers', and played by Sevan Stephan), who's having trouble cloning his grandmother. The lab promises to fix the problem, but instead creates a gigantic snail.

The result is a catalytic reaction of Red Dwarf
and The IT Crowd, in a solution of Are You Being Served? And it's not a bad formula.

What better place to try to reinvent the studio-based sitcom than in a science laboratory? If you're stuck for the next surreal joke or lethal punchline you can always just set about whipping one up in a Petri dish.

Your man in the white coat here is Chris Addison (who played the hapless special adviser Olly Reeder in The Thick Of It) and co-wrote this with Carl Cooper.

His co-workers - including Selina Caddell, Jo Enright and Dan Tetsell - all come from the school of You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps.

And perhaps science-fiction lab would be a better description of the setting because this is a place where pretty much anything is possible - cloning, giant molluscs - anything really, except hiding your chocolate from your workmates.

Childishly inventive and frequently just silly, it's not a bad first impression.

Lenny Henry is back on radio and on familiar territory - comedy, music and Birmingham. Unusually, though, this time he's the straight man as the classical music-loving son, Adam Sharpe, of the eponymous Rudy, the owner of a specialist record shop. This doesn't mean, though, that Henry doesn't get a few laughs along the way, which is only fair since the script by Danny Robins and Dan Tetsell is absolutely stuffed with them. The set-up can be briefly explained - father and son are estranged, father suffers slight heart murmur which becomes a full-blown heart attack so son will return to Brum to run record shop for nothing. But you'll go a long way to find better and more consistent one-liners and, as a bonus, some fine vintage ska and reggae music used to link the scenes. A joy - and there are three more episodes to follow.