David Tennant

The 20 best TV comedies of 2017

Here - in no particular order - are the 20 best shows from 2017.

Why Just a Minute hides a far more ruthless reality

Just A Minute has become one of the nation's most beloved radio shows -- but it began as a classroom humiliation, inflicted on daydreamers by a history teacher at Sherborne School in the Thirties.

Catherine Tate reunites with David Tennant in Ducktales

The Doctor Whp stars are reuniting on the rebooted Ducktales - with Tate lending her voice talents to the role of Scrooge McDuck's arch nemesis Magica de Spell. Which means you'll be hearing her dulcet tones alongside Tennant's - as he's providing Scrooge's voice in the revival.

The latest dispatch from the frontline of unnecessary meetings finds Ian Fletcher deciding what to do about Ryan Chelford. Judged purely in punditry terms, the cross-dressing ex-footballer's appearance on Match of the Day didn't go well, but he has been trending heavily on social media where "reaction ... has been almost universally divided". David Tennant's narration neatly skewers Auntie's dilemma: "The problem for the BBC is that they don't know what to do."

It was a genuine delight to hear, once more, the strains of the Animal Magic theme as W1A returned for a third series. One of the joys of watch-again is that, in addition to the more garish tropes to which we're now used - the folding bikes, Monica Dolan's perpetual Welsh whining, Jessica Hynes's PR gorgon - one can find, in almost every 30 seconds, unlooked-for subtleties. David Westhead as Neil Reid, the one-man Greek chorus whose muttered "bollocks" says, in sadly splendid isolation, what we're all thinking, and the more hidden verbal tics from deadpan narrator David Tennant: "the department for culture, media and also for some reason sport"... "assistant of some sort Will Humphries".

Incidentally, did you notice Dolan in Strike, playing the wrongly jailed wife? True skills, to turn from blistering darkness to high comedy over two nights. W1A continues to draw flak, roundly undeserved: too BBC-smug, too London, too hugging of itself, too versed in PR knowingness, too not-Brexit. I revere it as a brave commission, and a gleeful and celebratory use of most of the best comedy actors and improvisers of the last decade, surely a golden age, and long may it continue: at least until a massive backdrop of caustic creator John Morton appears on one of the walls, at which point the BBC can officially be proved to have eaten itself.

W1A review - the Way Ahead is behind and it's brilliant

The returning mockumentary send-up of the BBC is very funny at times, if a bit smug. Perhaps it should sharpen its daggers and look at Auntie's pay gap...

W1A: Why this final series might be the best yet.

I'm just a little upset that this is the final series as, from what I've seen, W1A is arguably the BBC funniest comedy that's currently on screen and I'm just wondering if the reason its leaving the screens is because of Morton's ability to spoof the company that's actually in charge of recommissioning his brilliant sitcom.

W1A series three preview

There are moments in W1A that are almost too agonising to watch. The circuitous meetings of the BBC's directionless yet ironically named Way Ahead group so accurately replicate the prevarications of real corporate life that you can feel the knuckle-gnawing frustration from your own sofa.