Dawn French

Murder Most Horrid (BBC2), no great favourite of mine, turned up trumps with the story of Daisy (Dawn French), a soft-hearted abbatoir worker, who is mistaken for an executioner in South America. For reasons too curly to disentangle, she executes the entire government by mistake. Live on TV. This, as you might anticipate, is a roaring ratings success. As Daisy says "There hasn't been anything worth watching on telly recently."

It's always hard to lampoon the excesses of a feature film when you've only got a TV budget to work with but, if you embark on a pastiche of the entire oeuvre of Federico Fellini, you've got to be extremely brave and exceptionally talented. Fortunately, both adjectives apply to French and Saunders (BBC1) who, in their present series, have consistently been firing on eight cylinders (I don't know what's fuelling them but, if it's legal, I'll have some).

What sets French And Saunders apart from the rest is their quirky and original choice of targets and unscrupulous attention to detail. Any idiot can attempt pastiche, but few would think of spoofing The House of Eliott, and even fewer could produce such an acutely observed parody as The House of Idiot, in which the problems of filming period drama on a limited budget were cruelly, but hilariously, exposed.