David Stubbs (I)

A well-worn spoof format, with roving reporters unearthing grainy footage of lookalikes cavorting riotously in the guise of the rich and famous. So, we see Camilla and Kate getting drunk in a studio, Simon Cowell sitting on a toilet seat carefully layered with black loo paper and Prince William at an all-night garage, in an abysmal scene featuring a turbanned sales clerk who is a throwback to Amusing Asian stereotypes of the 70s. If you love the worst elements of BBC3, you'll love this. The rest of you will not.

This new sitcom boasts a prestigious cast, including Sally Phillips and Tom Conti, and a strong premise with lots of contemporary relevance - Phillips is sacked from her job after a violent clash with a co-worker, meaning that she and her family, including her useless "entrepreneur" of a husband - must move back in with her ageing parents in Kettering. All of this may yet yield something good, but this opening episode is clunky, cardboard stuff in the main that fails to make the leap from paper to screen. There's no laugh track but for all we know there could have been a primed studio audience watching who simply failed to chuckle throughout.

It's about time that someone devised a lighthearted panel show involving a bunch of British comedians - and, thankfully, Channel 4 have stepped in to fill the gaping void with this new series. Hosted by Griff Rhys Jones, with Marcus Brigstocke and Charlie Baker as regular captains, it is, as Jones admits, a "nostalgia fest", in which the teams are presented with clips of archive news footage from decades past, with all their attendant horrors of industrial strife and terrible haircuts, and attempt to show off their memories of current affairs past - both momentous and trivial.

In the 70s, audiences laughed in appreciative recognition as Mike Yarwood impersonated a range of public characters, even including trade union leaders. With latterday cultural fragmentation and the thin spread of increasingly nondescript "celebrities", the job of an impressions show such as this, starring Morgana Robinson and Terry Mynott, becomes all the harder. It is telling that they often have to announce who it is they're doing. Still, this is as capable as could be expected; in the first episode, Bear Grylls tries out his survival skills in the suburbs, while David Attenborough studies at close hand the remarkable animal that is Frankie Boyle.

Tonight, the Olympic Deliverance team are forced to come up with a strategy that reconciles the apparently irreconcilable demands of the Muslims and the French. The Algerians are demanding a Shared Belief Centre that faces Mecca, while the French are threatening to pull out of the Games if a separate mosque is constructed. Clever, if not exactly original: the Sydney Olympics were preceded by a similar Australian comedy, The Games. That proved to be an anti-jinx, as the 2000 Games were lauded as an organisational success. Will Twenty Twelve do the same for London?

One of the finest episodes of this series to date, scripted by Steve Pemberton. Led by a fearsome martinet of a coach, members of the British Olympic synchronised swimming team turn up at the hotel, with a fawning Joyce prepared to eject guests from the pool to accommodate them. Elegant they may be but, as Tim Healy's down-to-earth transvestite has it, they're "thrashing about like a bag of cats in a canal" beneath the surface. While it's not exactly Pinter, it's ITV fun at its best.

Most of the regulars return to top up their perma-tans but there's a significant newcomer tonight in the form of ex-Corrie stalwart, Loose Women's Sherrie Hewson as the new resort manager Joyce Temple Savage, determined to hoist the place up a star with expertise gained in "three years under Richard Branson". Such dodgy double entendres are the small-ish price to pay for Benidorm's warm, amiably recumbent fare.

There's an intriguing twilight zone between hipster music and comedy in which only a few dare to dwell - Look Around You and Jam belong to this rarefied tradition. Here, Noel Fielding, a jollier but no less effective master of the genre, returns with his latest show, a neo-psychedelic riot of mirth that regurgitates decades of memories of broad, Technicolor TV entertainment from The Banana Splits onwards. Tonight's luridly droll cornucopia sees two French chefs take a trip to the moon, a New York cop going undercover in Miami and Noel attempting to create a felt-tip masterpiece.

The format has been revamped. Frank Skinner is in the chair and, rather than chance the quality of an edition on a single guest, they've spread their bets across a panel of three, with Skinner determining which of their peeves - growing up, film and TV, etc - will descend into Room 101. There's a less whimsical, slightly harder edge to the guests' critiques; Danny Baker rails against "cool" with a written, prepared text dripping with bile, Robert Webb lays into Jeremy Kyle with undisguised scorn and even Fern Britton has a go at the homework heaped on today's kids.

As Brooker has observed in these pages, 2011 has been a grimly bumper cornucopia of events, what with Royal Weddings, the phonehacking enquiry and riots, to say nothing of Pippa Middleton's backside looming unseemly like a double moon over the media landscape. With the assistance of Doug Stanhope, Adam Curtis and Brian Limond, Brooker will be glancing back beneath arched eyebrow over the events, factual and fictional of 2011, dousing its overheated manias, controversies and moral panics with a cool and justly savage wit.