Dannii Minogue

The bespectacled comic has a bumper line-up on Sunday's show, headed by Lady Gaga - who will perform her new single Marry The Night and, according to reports, will confess on the show to peeing in dustbins. Hmmmm. How to follow that? Well, you could always try fellow funnyman Peter Kay, who will also be there to promote his new DVD The Tour That Didn't Tour - Tour, as well as Dannii Minogue who will be discussing her new book My Style.

About 10 minutes in, The Morgana Show, a new comedy showcase for Channel 4, was going to get a really terrible review. The opening sketch - a gag about Boris Johnson at prep school - combined a weak impersonation with a silly and unfunny script. The Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minogue take-offs weren't much better and a sketch featuring Gilbert - a teenager with learning difficulties who stars in his own home-made television show - struck me as bullying in its comedy, the kind of television that will go down very well with callow 14-year-olds, but will make life absolute hell for any of their contemporaries unfortunate enough to wear bottle-bottom glasses. But then Morgana released the bully in me by doing a wickedly accurate impression of Fearne Cotton, a presenter who richly deserves all the mockery she can get. And I laughed at the running gag about Lady Gaga, glimpsed doing banal household tasks in wildly improbable costumes. By the end, I even laughed at Gilbert, thanks to the detail of Robinson's performance. But I'm not proud of myself.

Continuing Tuesday night's sour comedy hour, The Morgana Show is a brand new five-part sketch show that's similarly humorless and prolonged to Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights - although there's a glimmer of potential because its star, Morgana Robinson, is clearly a talented performer and mimic. It's just a shame the writing can't match her. Unusually, Channel 4 commissioned this show after being impressed by Morgana's self-made pilot, without testing the water by showing it as part of the Comedy Lab season, or on late-night E4.

It's great someone had faith in this show, and for someone like Morgana to be rewarded for her proactive nature in getting themselves a TV show made, but that made the disappointment of The Morgana Show itself cut even deeper. I wanted this to be a comedy treasure to discover and spread the word to others, but it turned out to be fool's gold.

It's another character-based sketch show; one with a slight League Of Gentlemen vibe, spliced with sketches you'd expect to see in a darker version of The Fast Show. Indeed, Morgana Robinson reminded me of Caroline Aherne at times, particularly during a sketch where she plays the owner of a funeral parlour married to an oafish husband. Other characters include: Madolynn, a prima donna Hollywood star now in her middle age; a pair of news reporters who trade insults with each other before the cameras roll; and homemade videos featuring a boy called Gilbert, filmed by his long-suffering granddad on a camcorder in the early-'90s. There are also a smattering of celebrity impressions: a good approximation of Cheryl Cole (seen reading an uncouth Dannii Minogue's Tarot cards backstage on The X Factor), Boris Johnson as a bumbling public schoolboy, and a truly uncanny Fearne Cotton (repurposed as a hyperactive daredevil stuntwoman, above-left).

By the end of this first episode, one thing was clear: Morgana Robinson's a talent in need of some good writers. Her Fearne Cotton impression was marvelous, and Gilbert is a convincing character with a lot of reality to him, but practically everything fell flat because it wasn't especially funny (no memorable punchlines or clever twists), and too many characters felt derivative (the monstrous actress cliché, bickering news reporters, etc.)

Based on a memoir by Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys department store, the second series of this camp and sweary sitcom comes to an end next week. Tonight Simon (Luke Ward-Wilkinson) recounts the story behind how he won the Turner Prize. The X Factor's Dannii Minogue turns up in a sprightly comic turn and there are some lovely jokes throughout, some of which err on the far side of strict decency. Olivia Colman and Aidan McArdle play Simon's parents.

You can picture the scene... an executive at BBC entertainment groans as ITV's Harry Hill's TV Burp grows more popular with each series. "Get me something like that!" she/he barks. "Something that takes the mickey out of everyone on the telly. People like watching that on a Saturday." The result is far, far better than you'd expect. Either the producers have crammed all their best efforts into the first episode or this mock-celebrity-filled sketch show is a winner. It doesn't hurt that Jon Culshaw and Debra Stephenson are right on the money with almost all their impressions. Culshaw gets Michael McIntyre's strange, high/low voice perfectly and his Ross Kemp on Gangs spoof where Kemp meets the Famous Five ("The whole gang is clearly off their head on ginger beer") works a treat. Stephenson, meanwhile, is equally convincing as Dannii Minogue or a grimacing Davina McCall. Why it's quite so enjoyable to see, say, Ray Mears impersonated to a tee or some lovingly imagined links from The One Show is anyone's guess. But it is.

This new series from the Comedy Connections people has a rather misleading title.

Despite the efforts of presenter Clive Anderson and three other scriptwriters to find the funny side of different TV formats this is a fairly straight run-through.

It would certainly benefit from less of Clive's awkward links and more of what we really want to see, the clips which cover all the bases from an ancient show called Top Town right through to today's The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and John Sergeant doing his Stiffly Come Dancing thing.

Among the gems tonight is ex-Corrie actress Debra Stephenson doing impressions of judges Amanda Holden, Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minogue.

And Les Dennis reveals that the clapometer on Opportunity Knocks was operated by a couple of prop men pushing a lever to pretty much wherever they liked. A generation is collectively gutted.