Euan Ferguson

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

This pilot will probably win a proper commission, which wouldn't be a bad thing. It wasn't badly written (by Cold Feet's Mike Bullen); some fine lines, plenty of frotting looks and the promise of much sex, and you can easily see the overall idea, which is This Life for the Facebook generation. Two worries. First, without there having yet been the space to expand the characters, we've simply seen their situations, and frankly it's hard to care about what happens to any of them; hard, actually, to even like any of them, with the possible exception of Ed Byrne, and even his charmer of a failing photographer - lopsided grin, bedroom eyes, and Ed's doing a fine job following Dylan Moran into this territory - is too unreconstructed to ring quite true. Second, it's this Facebook generation thing, which actually makes you query the whole premise (and, actually, much of Facebook.) Were they really ever such good friends? They've even been brought together under false circumstances, Hannah toying with the idea of ruining one of their forthcoming marriages. As Sara's sister, Fran (Sarah Jane Potts) says, counselling her vulnerable sibling against getting back in with a group she hasn't heard from for eight years and who are likely to hurt her again (while also, of course, shagging one of them), "You can't say that you just 'lost touch'. Because friends don't lose touch." Fair point, actually.

I was understimulated by the first mention of Mordrin McDonald: 21st Century Wizard. Joanne Rowling's ubiquity has been in danger of buggering up wizards: you find yourself in danger of echoing that don in the Eagle and Child who greeted another self-congratulatory reading session between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein with the necessary phrase: "Not more fucking elves."

But this was good. Funny good, pithy good. Mordrin is a laconic, lazy, pissed-off Scottish wizard, doomed to attempt, with vitriolic reluctance, heroic tasks in an unheroic world. No missing back-story here on, for instance, Mordrin's name: his grandfather was bored during Countdown a thousand years ago: yes, that's the kind of throwaway line I enjoy, and this is full of them, and it also reunites Jack Docherty and Gordon Kennedy from TV's sorely missed Absolutely, which is a humungous golden spitting dragon of a good idea.

And Another Thing... Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide

Douglas Adams is re-born in Eoin Colfer's masterful prose, says Euan Ferguson.

Why Chris Morris had to make Brass Eye

The man who set Britain talking with a 30-minute TV satire is already moving on to his next target.