Euan Ferguson

Mum had no laughter track, but that wasn't the singular difference about this remarkable comedy [compared to Upstart Crow]. The fact that the glorious Lesley Manville hasn't played more comedy was the thing. An utter natural, she's so far been constrained by having to win seemingly endless awards in bittersweet Mike Leigh films, as if there's any other kind, but is now apparently freed up to slum it. Slum on, say I.

It's Butterflies for yet another generation, and as delightful. Again, a subtle mother - in this case a sudden widow- is the sane fulcrum around which certain fine madnesses, ranging from the silly to the grotesque to the heartbroken, revolve and tilt. It's a rather brave piece of engineering by BBC2 schedulers, gambling that the Friday night 10pm slot might attract an audience of wise young drunks, as well it might.

Manville is perfectly complemented by Peter Mullan, playing against type as seldom before - awkward, stuttery, shrinking, though I'd still never want to bat away his accent in a dark alley, and I'm bloody Scottish. Elsewhere, it's a dead heat for acting honours between Lisa McGrillis, as the son's exuberantly gauche girlfriend, and Dorothy Atkinson as the haughty sister-in-law, ("So what stopped you getting a pond in the end? Did you just realise it was...tacky?"). Two absolute stock comedy stereotypes, but seldom done better, and writer Stefan Golaszewski (Him & Her) somehow raises everything to a sharper level.

Very early on in Upstart Crow, a collaborative Ben Elton-William Shakespeare vehicle for the hopelessly thick and untalented David Mitchell, a member of the studio audience reacted to Liza Tarbuck just saying something in an accent, with her titty-dumplings to the fore with the kind of prolonged loud screeching fit that you or I could only hope to achieve while dousing our genitals in hydrochloric acid. My heart sank. But soon it actually began to get funny, sometimes very. The audience member had obviously been led out by an intern with the promise of a cup of tea and perhaps, actually it's to be hoped, a reassuring whisper of "you're not clever enough for this, dear". By the end, this mashup of Will's artistic frustrations in an England seething with stupidity, and as relevant to today as to 1584, had become a delight, to the extent the audience was anticipating the gags. Of a fiendishly cunning plot to frustrate young love, in which it had become necessary to procure a play-dead potion, Mitchell's brimming "I can't see how it can possibly go wrong" had much of the hubristic glee in seeing it coming of a Mainwaring, a Hancock.

Inevitable parallels - there was much God's bodikins! and gut-porridge stuff - will be drawn with Blackadder, although perhaps someone could tell me why that's in any conceivable way a bad thing. But Mr Elton has (almost) wholly redeemed himself for crimes against David Haig in the relentlessly smile-free elf'n'safety trudge that was 2013's The Wright Way, and it's nice to see he's got his brain back. And I do like Spencer Jones as Kempe, played as Ricky Gervais as David Brent - way too knowingly see-what-I-did-there, but that's how Ben rolls.

Flowers, which ran through the week on Channel 4, was a true hen's teeth rarity: we were witnessing, I think, the invention of a new genre. I'm just not sure quite what it was. Thorny, yes, prickly and awkward. Bleakly black too. Resoundingly human and truly funny. Above all, the singular vision of show runner (and writer and director and co-star) Will Sharpe, an Anglo-Japanese former Footlights president. What I do know is that I could have watched it all year long.

There were elements of Roald Dahl and Japanese anime, of Black Mirror and of Alan Ayckbourn, of fairytales for children who drink. Essentially the tale of a depressed writer and his savagely dysfunctional family, as the week wore on it became more forgiving. It's a sign of good drama when there's strength in depth of casting, and there were relishably chunky cameos for Angus Wright and Anna Chancellor as the true grotesques of the piece. But the family itself, the Flowers, survived near fatalities and worse to emerge, if not triumphant, then hugely and recognisably normal.

Olivia Colman, now forgiven the occasional misstep in The Night Manager, was back to all her charm and glory. We have grown used to seeing Colman in full-teeth mode, but she'd obviously been hiding a seventh set: no one else can hiss the accusatory "blabbermouth" while still blinding the world with a smile so wide nor so full of brittle self-doubt. Then there was Daniel Rigby as the son who bores everything but the pants off women, and Sophia Di Martino as sis Amy, the tender fulcrum around which much revolves. Above all, Julian Barratt as father Maurice, who conjures worlds of depression from just a pocketful of mumbles. The sadly salient point came on Thursday, when Deborah (Colman) attempted to reach the heart of Maurice's depression: we can fight it, she says, fight the monster together, maybe just with love. A shaggy shake of a sorrowful head. "No. Love just makes it worse." Truthfully, a week-long gem.

I Want My Wife Back is a truly unfortunate title, in that it not only reveals a tin ear for titling of programmes but will let snarky reviewers change the W to an L. And, yes, I wouldn't mind that half-hour back.

Everyone, I imagine, likes Ben Miller (the non-smug Alexander Armstrong) but not even he, nor Caroline Catz, could quite save this derivative sitcom, not while the likes of Camping and Fresh Meat exist. A love-rat boss? A surprise party gone wrong... surprised? A pleasant middle-class English chap caught out lying by an insistent pedant, his lies getting more outre and unmanageable by the minute? Well, I laughed until I stopped, which was frightfully quickly.

Stewart Lee said in an earlier broadcast that "no one is equipped to review me". That's me told, bless him. The alleged theme of last week's Comedy Vehicle was patriotism. He could so easily have been lazy. Stew is many bastarding things, but lazy isn't one.

Somehow, he managed - mouth-farting into a mic - to turn a full three minutes of the sounds of a cat's diarrhoea into the most plosive and gorgeous argument against deference. It was wonderful, and I still stand and applaud its sculpted perfection. A man mouth-farting into a microphone, while mumbling the national anthem badly and talking about cat shit shouldn't have been subtle, but somehow it and its wider points were, and clog-brained oversentimental deference might want to pipe down for a bit.

BBC Two's "comedy thriller" Stag sees seven moneyed and pompous southern child-men that have hurled themselves and their greed-cards into the maw of rainy Perthshire. The best man on the stag do is called Ledge, and this isn't shorthand for thick and shelfish: it's short for "Legend", which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the banker chaps. The hunters, of course, become the hunted. It's Deliverance as written by Irvine Welsh and, somehow, Nicola Sturgeon.

"You're supposed to be taking us hunting, not standing around looking Scottish," demands Ledge of his hired gamekeeper. He is echoed - "too full of Mars bars in batter", ho ho, by the other surefire dicks and other noncom asshats. Don't they know that their gamekeeper is played by James Cosmo, in the planes of whose entire face honour and murder lurk?

It gets better, and better, and the humour finally takes a back seat to the humanity. Stick with this: wholly rewarding and surprising.

The last-ever series (boo) of Fresh Meat told us that comedy on C4 might never get better. Eleven weeks away from finals, one night off. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asks tequila Josie of the supine JP, and therein awaits an entire ocean of stupidity.

The naming of JP's brother as "Tomothy", and JP's explanation, was quiet genius, as has been the strength of Jack Whitehall, and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, all along.

Red Top, the latest outing for the once splendid Comic Strip team, and we won't begrudge them a certain resting on ancient laurels, was an altogether mixed bag, as Peter Richardson and co gleefully ran rings round lawyers to bring us the purported tale of phone hacking and the Met, Rupert M and Tony B and Rebekah Brooks (played with peppy malevolence by Maxine Peake), set with a certain bizarreness in the 70s. Much was shambolic, missing easy marks. Wendi Deng as pastiche of Chinese sex ninja? But Johnny Vegas was great as the tabloid sleazehound turned Deep Throat, and there was great guilty joy at seeing Lewis Macleod as The Guardian's ex-editor Alan Rusbridger, played as a lisping, patronising Chris Biggins in a yachting cap and mincing below a banner reading "Never knowingly enjoy yourself". And the gang still managed, rather subtly, to skewer Brooks's implausible juxtapositioning of a reputation for micromanagement with that breezy verdict that said she knew nothing of phone taps.

Tracey Ullman's new sketch show, much heralded as her 30-year return from stateside exile, was fine, fine, if you wanted uncanny verisimilitude when it came to Dame Judi Dench and Angela Merkel. She has done a fine job of not being 30 years out of touch with British humour, and the Dench/"national treasure" shoplifting gag wore well, for this episode at least. But there was nothing in particular to convince us we should have missed Ullman in the way in which we might have missed the exile of, say, Paul Merton or Graeme Garden.

In Crashing six disparate, oddball people are not squatting but "protecting" unoccupied premises, in this case a mothballed hospital. So far, so much the reflection of our loopy property values, and plenty were the nods to Fresh Meat and This Life, neither of which this is at all. Yet. Do give it time. There are great moments of comic timing - not least from Kate (Louise Ford) - and, actually, not a little to get excited about, and the second episode's even better.