Daniel Roche

The Brockmans are the most convincing sitcom family since the Royles. The last episode in the latest series of Outnumbered was, as usual, perfectly pitched between exquisite gag-packed comedy and fleeting moments of unsentimental family drama.

But even when dealing with Pete's drunken indiscretion with another woman, or little Karen's road accident, writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin never lost sight of their comic intent. Instead, Karen expressed disappointment that dad had broken his wedding vows - "the vicar's going to be furious" - before harassing a kindly nurse with tacit threats of legal action if her jab hurt more than just "a tiny bit" as promised.

The subtly touching closing scene, in which the realistically reunited parents left hospital with a bandaged Karen, as she wittered on delightfully, said more about enduring family ties than any number of schmaltzy homilies.

Although the youngest kids in Outnumbered are exasperating, they're also unaffectedly charming and clearly far funnier and more real than any other children in sitcom history. Partly improvised by child actors Ramona Marquez and Daniel Roche, their skewed righteousness, ruthless inquisitiveness and semi-logical flights of fancy appear to be an endless source of inspired comedy. I just can't work out whether it's a good thing or not that one of the funniest comedy performers in Britain is a partially scripted nine-year-old girl.

The youngest son Ben (Daniel Roche) is in trouble at school for re-enacting the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Back in the relative safety of the home, he busies himself playing games inspired by Bear Grylls, one of which involves climbing up the north face of the wardrobe - until it is struck by an avalanche. Dad (Hugh Dennis), meanwhile, is still in the doghouse after the night of the bright green cocktails when he kissed a stranger. But all of this pales into insignificance when little Karen (Ramona Marquez) is hit by a car on the way to the school concert and rushed into hospital. Fortunately it isn't serious - just a few bumps and bruises. It's the unsuspecting nurse at the hospital you need to worry about.

Few things are guaranteed to make you panic quite so much as someone telling you not to. That's certainly the case in the last episode of the current series as Jake has to break news of a very worrying phone call to his dad.

With Pete and Sue's marriage rocky this week after he drunkenly kissed another woman, the Brockmans are really going through the mill. But thanks to the resilient skin of young boys all this is water off a duck's back to Ben, who is occupied elsewhere re-enacting his latest battle and attempting to become the first man to scale Everest (or the stairs at any rate) backwards without oxygen.

And Jake is about to discover that even family disasters can have a silver lining of sorts when Kelly - the object of his first serious teenage crush - is recruited to babysit him and his brother. As always though, it's Karen who steals the show during an earnestly hilarious conversation with a nurse in A&E.

As another series ends you can't help but wonder how long Ben and Karen's reign will last and what sort of performers the actors who play them will eventually grow into. Daniel Roche who plays Ben already looks like Alan Davies's tiny stunt-double, while Ramona Marquez would be able to reduce politicians to tears with a line of questioning and logic that would shame Jeremy Paxman.

The fourth episode of what has been an inconsistent third series of the sitcom following the travails of the Brockman family. Sue (Claire Skinner) is trying to prepare the house to show around potential buyers, at the same time as Pete (Hugh Dennis) gets ready for his colonoscopy while hung-over from a drunken night out. The children are up to their usual mischief, with Karen (Ramona Marquez) refusing to go to school and Ben (Daniel Roche) in trouble for playground antics. Though the show feels as if it's winding down as the children grow more knowing, on the form of this episode it remains more inventive than most of the competition.

Dad (Hugh Dennis) has woken up with a crippling hangover having being ambushed by bright green cocktails. His youngest son, Ben (Daniel Roche), is bitterly disappointed that he missed the sight of his father being sick. "Your face is all grey," he says, "like someone shaded you in with a pencil. You smell like the relief teacher who didn't last very long. The one with the shaky hand who kept bursting into tears for no reason." Because the day of Dad's hangover also happens to be Friday 13th, Karen (Ramona Marquez) is refusing to leave the house in case something bad happens and she is eaten by bears on the way to school. And to cap it all, this is the day that house hunters are coming round to view the house. Once again, Outnumbered provides half an hour of pure happiness.

Once again Outnumbered provides half an hour of pure happiness. The episode begins with the two brothers at loggerheads. The younger one, Ben (Daniel Roche), has changed his brother's status on Facebook to "Jake is a transvestite", so Jake (Tyger Drew-Henry) responded by changing Ben's Facebook status to "Ben died on Tuesday". Meanwhile Dad (Hugh Dennis) struggles to explain to the children what a colonoscopy is ("Will we be able to watch it live on television?"), while Mum (Claire Skinner) makes a doomed attempt to try and explain to her 13-year-old son what is meant by the objectification of women. It's consistently funny, but best of all is the adult tennis match featuring Ben as a ball-boy and seven-year-old Karen (Ramona Marquez) as the referee.

Series three of this engagingly downbeat family comedy kicks off as Pete and Sue Brockman - the two of them outnumbered by their three children - go sightseeing in London with Pete's mother. Competing tensions are as usual caught precisely as Jake, now 14, Ben, nine, and Karen, seven, each have very different ideas as to what makes for a good day out, and aren't shy of letting their parents know about it.

Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner play Pete and Sue but their thankless roles as parents in the comedy are mirrored in real life, because they more or less have to stand back and watch the children steal the show. Much of the dialogue is improvised and Karen (Ramona Marquez, who won Best Female Comedy Newcomer at last year's British Comedy Awards) comes up with most of the best lines, including a smart run-through of the dos and don'ts of political correctness. Perhaps these are topped, though, when Ben (Daniel Roche) gives a spot-on, if scatological, analysis of Gordon Brown's political prospects.

A few of the jokes - the confusion between lesbian and Lebanon, for example - are not in their first flush of youth, and the scene in which Dennis is left to clown around on his own is jarring, but otherwise this is a note-perfect sitcom capturing the gentle mundanity of middle-class family life in Britain today.

At last - the family sitcom that reinvented family sitcoms returns for a third series. Back in 2007 Outnumbered was a blast of suburban fresh air; with its knowing kids running rings around bewildered adults, it felt dramatically and hilariously more real than anything that had gone before. It feels fractionally less fresh now but just as funny, as we rejoin the Brockmans on a sightseeing day out in London. Very soon, scarily precocious Karen (Ramona Marquez) is grumbling that she wants to go somewhere "more World- War-Two-ish" while uncontrollable Ben (Daniel Roche) is climbing on one of the Trafalgar Square lions and stabbing it with a ruler. "Die!" he shouts. "Die, Aslan, die!" Throughout, dad Pete (Hugh Dennis) wears his fixed expression of pain and confusion, like a baited bear. As a portrait of parenthood, it's terrific, even when the plotting, which includes a weary old joke involving a disabled loo, lets the side down. And the dialogue is as sharp as ever. "Look mummy," insists Karen, "I used to believe in wishes and all this nonsense but then my wish about Ben and the hyenas didn't come true."

The funniest kids on TV are back for a third series. But has Outnumbered become a victim of its own success? Back in 2007, when this was buried apologetically in the schedule's nether regions, there was a real novelty about small children being allowed to dictate proceedings. Now, after bagging three gongs at the British Comedy Awards last year, tonight's episode feels like an extended stand-up gig for Karen and Ben (Ramona Marquez and Daniel Roche).

You sit, arms folded, thinking, "Come on, then. Say something outrageous." Naturally, you don't have long to wait but the bits with the adults in between can feel like a distraction from the main event. That's not to take anything away from the show - just a sign of how hard it is to stay ahead of the game in comedy.

The Brockmans are on a sight-seeing trip around London tonight - an opportunity for Mum and Dad and Gran to be mortally embarrassed in front of a variety of internationally-recognisable landmarks. And from the one-liners the kids come out with, it really can't be much longer before they're invited on to the Have I Got News For You panel.

There are jokes about Gordon Brown tonight and the death of Diana that might have provoked howls of outrage if they were uttered by an adult. They still might but the power of these kids is that they can get away with anything - as their beleaguered parents (Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner) know only too well.

If only because it centres so much on the precocious (yet, for the most part, just the right side of annoying) younger members of the cast, there's an obviously limited shelf to this series, centred on the chaotic everyday life of a middle-class south London family. So, who knows, this may well be both the first and last Outnumbered Christmas special.

If it is, it's comfortably up to the standard of the two full series we've enjoyed so far, as we descend upon the Brockman family - Pete (Hugh Dennis), Sue (Claire Skinner) and their unruly offspring Ben, Jake and Karen (Daniel Roche, Tyger Drew-Honey and Ramona Marquez) - on a less than blissful Boxing Day.