David Mitchell (I)

A wonderfully enjoyable edition opens with Jimmy Carr claiming that he was given coffee in his bottle as a baby and progresses through the idea that Susanna Reid may have held the Breakfast team's speed record for drinking a pint of beer ("How big are your glugs?" enquires host Rob Brydon) and that Dave Myers of The Hairy Bikers once spent Christmas locked inside a bank.

All these prompt enjoyable cross-examination but, as so often, it's David Mitchell's mock-exasperation that really lights the comic touchpaper. "We've been doing this show for a thousand years!" he wails at one point to Lee Mack. "I know everything about you, including the fact that you did not learn to drive in a hearse."

Rob Brydon manfully steers the quiz show in which a talent for lying about your life leads to victory, especially if the opposition is vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes. Tonight, Lee Mack is flanked by Getting On star Joanna Scanlan and Henning Wehn, German Comedy Ambassador to Great Britain. The opposition is led by David Mitchell, skipping alongside Olympic golden jumper Greg Rutherford and Desert Island Discs jockey Kirsty Young, who claims she has five chickens all named after her favourite newsreaders. Please let it be true.

Picture if you will, David Mitchell on a stag weekend in Cornwall, taking some time out to have a surfing lesson. Are you struggling? Yes, Lee Mack struggles with the idea, too, so he challenges Mitchell to demonstrate his technique for going from prone to standing on the board. The series is all the better for serving up these occasional gems of physical comedy among the verbal sparring.

Meanwhile, German stand-up Henning Wehn applies his bracing vowel sounds to a travelling yarn about Spanish trains, Moroccan enclaves, Interpol and a suitcase full of books. It's so bizarre, he convinces Mitchell's team it must be true. But is it?

In the last series, Bob Mortimer was responsible for one of the show's classic moments when he claimed to be able to tear an apple in half with his bare hands. After an interrogation by David Mitchell that reduced Patsy Kensit to hysterics, Mitchell's team decided he was lying. He wasn't - and, to everyone's delight, he proved it.

Mortimer returns tonight and we can only hope for similarly priceless TV. Other guests include RT's own Sarah Millican (who once claimed on the show to have weed on a car seat and blamed it on the dog) and actor David Harewood. If we don't get a Homeland-related anecdote/fabrication from him, it'll be very disappointing.

Jenny from the block - J-Lo to her mates (Jennifer Lopez to you and me) - parks her famous rear on Graham's celebrity seat to big-up Beyoncé's Chime For Change charity concert tomorrow at Twickenham Stadium, part of a campaign to empower girls and women alike. Also on hand is TV quiz show fixture, Peep Show actor and comedian David Mitchell, who'll be contemplating his next career move as the current run of daily news satire 10 O'Clock Live nears the end of its run.

David Mitchell's top 10 comedy YouTube clips

This week is YouTube Comedy Week. David Mitchell has made this top list of his favourite 'unseen funny' YouTube vids.

Returning to assume his hosting position for an eye-watering seventh series, Rob Brydon stirs the comedy panel-show action with his familiar scurrilous cheek. David Mitchell and Lee Mack are back in harness as team captains, and tonight's porky-spinning guest line-up includes Rhod Gilbert, Vernon Kay, Dara O'Briain and Denise Van Outen. Who will turn out to be the most credible fibbers/most gullible listeners when it comes to telling tales - tall or true - about their own lives?

The funniest and most likeable panel game on television returns to brighten Friday nights, with Lee Mack and David Mitchell renewing their class-divided clash of wits.

As Mitchell has pointed out, the running rivalry trades on images of each other - as the unworldly toff and the philistine oik - that have precious little to do with reality, but hey, who cares when they deliver the laughs? The other panellists, Rob Brydon as host, even the format of the show, are all only biding time until Mack and Mitchell can start pitching derisive darts at one another.

But lest we forget, the gist of the show is celebs telling implausible - yet often true - stories about themselves and submitting to mocking cross-examination, before opponents try to guess if they're bluffing.

For added enjoyment, play along at home and pause before the reveal to take bets. It's not easy.

This, believe it or not, is the seventh series of Would I Lie to You?. A hardy perennial then, which seems to suggest that casting, not format is the most important factor in the success of a panel show. The competitive comic chemistry between posh pedant David Mitchell and ruthlessly efficient robo-quipper Lee Mack sustains the show, and Rob Brydon is a likeable host too.

A few of the rougher edges have been smoothed out over the years - WILTY? occupies a pre-watershed slot these days, so we can probably forget about any more appearances from Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr. But it remains really watchable Friday evening fare.

It's been scientifically proven that it's impossible to watch this without feeling at least 42% happier than before it started. True or false? Who cares.

What is absolutely true is that this is the seventh series of the rib-tickling Friday night favourite where team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack do such sterling work each week to keep the old North-South rivalry stoked up.

Rob Brydon will be in the presenter's chair once again and fibbing for all they're worth tonight (or are they?) will be comedian and occasional maths guru Dara O Briain, Rhod Gilbert, Vernon Kay - who claims that he once nearly caused a gas explosion while in a banana packing factory - and Denise van Outen, who has a confession to make about her bottom for viewers tonight. You can feel David Mitchell blushing behind his beard already.

It's a good job this goes out before the watershed, or things could get out of hand.