David Chater

This new sitcom, written by the same team responsible for Peep Show, sounded promising. It describes the lives of two men of a certain age who met in a pub and ended up living together. One is divorced, the other is a widower, and they both lust after their neighbour. Instead of reaching for pipe and slippers, the two of them belong to a generation that grew up with the Rolling Stones; although they may joke about age and decrepitude, in spirit they are eternally young. There is nothing wrong with the comic performances, but such an unashamedly old-fashioned format is strangely at odds with its subject matter. Peep Show this isn't.

Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, turns his attention to the world of professional darts in a satire of what he calls "the most vacuous and self-defeating foible of our times - the cult of minor celebrity". It follows the disintegrating career of a gormless Welsh darts player and his appalling wife and manager (Jonathan Lewis Owen and Katy Brand), as seen through the lens of a film-maker (Joe McKinney). Welsh is famous for writing the blackest of black comedies, only here the comedy is broader and more exaggerated - more Star Stories than Trainspotting. There are flashes of bleak and shocking humour, but at two hours it feels like an overblown sketch.

Lee Mack's sitcom about an amiable drifter infatuated with his beautiful landlady is back for a third series, and it still has a lot going for it. The characters are still likeable; the relationships are well defined and many of the quickfire gags hit the spot. But, for all its qualities, it is difficult nowadays to enjoy a comedy that relies on the bullying sound of laughter. It feels as though the viewer is being nagged and prodded by a manic nanny: "This a joke! Laugh at this!" It is worse than unnecessary - it spoils it.

Shameless is back. The days when it was a semi-autobiographical family saga written by Paul Abbott are long gone, and for years now it has been jumping sharks on a regular basis. Despite that, it still has a raucous energy and an irreverent, devil-may-care humour, and David Threlfall's performance as Frank Gallagher is up there among the finest comic performances to be found anywhere on television in the past ten years.

Dark and edgy is so last year, darling. New comedies must be warm, good-natured, a wee bit cuddly. They can still be silly, and surreal is good, but keep it basically nice, OK? Maybe the Government has been slipping something into the water supply or it's some strange collective reaction to the credit crunch, but Plus One is yet another sitcom featuring young people who are amiably daft. This week poor Rob Black (Daniel Mays) is still trying to find an impressive lady to be his 'plus one' at the wedding of his glamorous ex-girlfriend, Linsey (Miranda Raison) to the boy-band hunk Duncan from Blue.

After a successful pilot on Channel 4's comedy showcase strand last year, Plus One now has a series of its own - and deservedly so. The premise is simple: a sour gnome (Daniel Mays) is dumped by his girlfriend (Miranda Raison) in favour of Duncan from the boy band Blue (Duncan James). Eaten up with jealousy, the Mays character concocts increasingly desperate schemes to get even, which start badly and end in catastrophe. Although aimed at the under-40s, it incorporates such ancient virtues as character and narrative to go with the fantasy sequences and farcical mishaps. Give it a whirl.

Life of Riley is aimed fairly and squarely at viewers who wish the old-fashioned sitcom would make a comeback. This one has all the old favourite ingredients - inept parents, sophisticated teenagers, misunderstandings, silly walks and a touch of farce. You can hear the gags coming long before they appear, and when they do, they are greeted by shrieks of canned laughter. If you don't mind all that and you have a soft spot for Caroline Quentin, well . . . over to you. And as if to prove the old-fashioned sitcom is alive and kicking, it is followed by a brand new series of The Green Green Grass.

One of the many pleasures of Lead Balloon is the strength and diversity of the ensemble cast. Although the series revolves around the childish egotism of Rick (Jack Dee), everyone else - including the children - behave like grown-ups dealing with a fractious child. His wife reasons with Rick. His writing partner mocks him. Magda suffers him. His daughter and her boyfriend exploit or ignore him. Rick's behaviour, on its own, would be ridiculous and self-defeating. Surrounded by the eccentric sanity of a superb supporting cast, it is funny and vulnerable and endearing.

There is obviously a market for Kevin Bishop's distinctive brand of comedy, but it is difficult to know what it is. Using the broadest of broad-brush impressions, it purports to tell the story of how Elton John became the patron saint of celebrities. The characters pilloried include Diana, Princess of Wales, Freddie Mercury, Robert Downey Jr, Liz Hurley and so forth accompanied by a crass commentary that mocks Elton John's baldness and bad temper.

At best, it could be argued that Star Stories attacks celebrity culture with a Punch and Judy exuberance, but many viewers will find it crude and aggressively unfunny.

You could argue that Outnumbered ploughs a familiar comic furrow. It is, after all, about besieged middle-class parents dealing with three children, and it has antecedents that stretch all the way from Joyce Grenfell to My Family. But familiarity is irrelevant when the scripts - written by the Drop the Dead Donkey team, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin - are as acutely observed and as funny as this. The absence of a laughter track frees it from the straitjacket of gags, allowing it to veer off into unexpected directions. And best of all, there are the performances by the young actors. If you haven't seen them yet, you're missing something remarkable.