Euan Ferguson

Toast of London returned. I quite like it. Lovely little bits. Toast's mad agent, Jane Plough, pronouncing it "Pluff". Great take on Cockernee rhyming slang - "Could have been something to do with the amount of Children in Need I was smoking"; Meryl Streep's alleged fear of bells; but too often unsmiling longueurs intervene. It's no Count Arthur Strong or Citizen Khan, certainly, but it's also no Peep Show.

"The problem for you is... I'm your friend."

Never was a truer phrase spoken. In a glorious opening to the very last series of Peep Show, the fabulously distrustable Jez, within whom somehow reside the soul and bones of Caligula, is living in a loo. Darling Mark is, six months on, still seething with anger about his ex, Dobby, and Jez's having tried to stick tongues down throats, yet needs Jez, if only to obviate his boredom with new real life and a new real flatmate. An apology is called for, by Mark, clearly with a certain pomp. Jez's witchy obfuscation and attempt at male bonding - "Obviously, I think we're both very sorry about what happened" - was a masterclass. Asked to apologise again, he resorted to crazed and thickened accents. Always a winner I find, when saying sorry. Just lovely and surely gong-heavy soon.

Doc Martin represents one of my guiltier pleasures, in that I watch it in what I think of as my time "off", freed from doing the serious important note-taking shtick or being asked to struggle professionally to fathom the enduring appeal of Downton. The Big Bang Theory, The Wright Stuff, reruns of Jonathan Creek or Endeavour - all are just-for-me equivalents of warm mismatched socks, a hot-water bottle and burnt bubbling cheap cheese on toast. Bliss.

So I dread the day Martin Ellingham - his surname an anagram of showrunner Dominic Minghella, is this interesting? (No, Ed.) - gets all worthy or political or even relevant, and I have to review it seriously. And, the saints be blessed, that still looks roundly unlikely from this sofa. We're still freely invited, 11 years on and at the close of the latest series, to giggle smugly at Cornwall, and what immense fun that is. Those who have been there know that the inhabitants live in perhaps the most glorious corner of God's green earth, and there should be payback, so we're probably entitled to regard the Cornubian batholith as the Land That Education Forgot. Almost everyone be a moron.

Bert Large is a cunning 20-chinned moron. Son Al is a misunderstood moron. Mrs Tishell is a comedy escapee from The Archers, and a moron in italics. Sexy Morwenna is a trainee moron (yet there's hope, and, left to her own devices, she correctly divines that 100% of those waiting for the absent doctor's curt ministrations are slouchy malingerers or alcoholics). King Captain Moron is, of course, PC Joe, who in this final series episode managed to louse up in every way imaginable short of snagging his own pancreas in a bear-trap. Actor John Marquez deserves great credit: not since Father Dougal has there been on our screens a more credible, human, moron.

In the end, after some relatively serious business involving the Doc's kidnapping, serious mainly because one doesn't ever dick about with Gemma Jones possessed of the "nice" end of a shotgun and a righteous wrath, Louisa and Martin were gently reunited. "I think I've been a little bit obsessed with people having to be normal. But they're not, are they?" You said it, girl from Cornwall. Sweeter, more seriously, "I know you weren't going to let me down," which is very much all a girl wants. But... only sometimes. Hence the clever personal tension underwriting the relationship at the heart of this series, and which, apart from the sweet morons and Martin Clunes's deadpan perfections, lends it its entirely fathomable appeal. More, more.

In a week crammed with riches, we had the return of Catastrophe, rushed back for its second series this year without having apparently suffered for any undue haste. It's still glorious - gloriously profane, savagely observant, yet shot through with, at its heart, two characters so obviously in love they can be ripping the serious bejesus out of each other at full volume yet still turn away and snicker at something funny said. Which happens often.

The miracle of this programme is not just the two stars, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, nor the fact that their very coupling - a car-crash between loopy Irishness and straight-jawed Yankhood - brings so much potential, but that the pair find so many new ways to say something delightful, believable, witty about the hoariest old sitcom cliches. Breast-feeding, childbirth, dire family gatherings: all are tackled with a freshness of thought that amazes, after decades in which I've gazed at similar setups with my pained curdling-milk face-ache on.

We also had Carrie Fisher as Rob's exuberantly unlikable mother, and the beginnings of dementia, and post-partum depression, and a dead dog: but all treated with humanity, not least when Sharon, serious for once and worried that she can't bond with her three-day-old daughter, frets over the fact the baby looks "manipulative, like it's plotting something". Hmm. We've all seen those kids.

To the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, Detectorists' gentle comedy, normally words which conjure fierce misery, works splendidly on both that and many other levels. As far as I can recall from this resumption, absolutely nothing happened, but it happened perfectly: and, again, a pairing is at the heart. I've been lucky enough to interview both Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook, and they must be among the least egotistical delights in the business. It shows in their quiet on-screen companionship: and yet already I'm gripped with frissons, and fiercely rooting for them to find that damned trove.

"So, uh, we've got a young cullah'd fellah coming on next. I don't think it's fair to laugh at the afflicted, but... you know the reason their palms are all pink? It's the way they stack 'em before spraying..." For most of us it took about 10 seconds of watching Danny and the Human Zoo, though I'll accept 20 if you're from outwith the M25, or a full 40 minutes if you happen to live in Sunningdale or Midwich, to suss that this was not an utterly valid depiction of Britain today.

And we'd have been right. Early 70s. Early 70s Dudley, in fact, and Mark Benton playing, albeit terrifically, a sweatily odious nimrod (as they said in the 70s). Here he was playing to the woeful gallery (near-empty, chain-smoking, and the beer were as flat as the stomachs weren't) and introducing a 15-year-old Danny Fearon to the stage. Danny was, as some may know, a lightly fictionalised Lenny Henry.

Mr Henry, Sir Lenworth Henry as now is, has been a stout heart in the business they call show for as long now as the stalwarts - Tommy Cooper, Michael Crawford - he first set out (aged 14) to impersonate. As with those troupers, his act has not always satisfied all humours. In fact, there are some (me) who say he might have sideswiped the comedy altogether and gone straight to straight acting, apparently his natural metier, according to the many garlands for his Othello; and earlier this telly year, as Godfrey in The Syndicate, he waltzed off with the show.

But that wasn't going to be an option, was it, for the lad from Dudley. Rada would have been as closed to him as would running through the Garrick naked. His only way ahead, other than dying a daily death in the British Leyland shop, was to refine and sculpt a natural gift for mimicry, and (at least as portrayed here by Kascion Franklin, avowedly another big star in the finding), a graceful mix of ebullient anger. And then get on dirty stages in trodden towns - as one teen pal says, "I'm white, and even I'm scared for yow" - and then get gothically shafted by sleazy managers and agents, and sleazy white girlfriends, all in it for the goldbricking. And then, as happened back then, sell out: Danny's/Lenny's minstrel show segments made for incredibly queasy viewing, not least for their portrayal of the all-white audiences ponying along to blacked-up ruffed-up chintzery. In my, in your, lifetime.

Written by Lenny Henry himself, this was a beautiful and a valuable programme, which is to make it sound less fun than the huge fun it was. (And not least because of the soundtracking: ironies wholly lost on Dudley, they were still dancing then to James Brown, Stevie W, Curtis Mayfield, Shirley & Co.) Many scenes, particularly those between young Danny and his father - "What do you know about happiness? You never laugh..." - resonated with bittersweet pith. It may have been hard for the real Henry, here portraying Danny's (ie his own) father, to bear, given the story's arc of a mother's infidelity and a compromised marriage, but bear it he did, acting with style and two grumpy smiles throughout. I will never again underestimate Mr Henry. I retain the right to find him a glowing actor and a less than funny comedian. But nor, after this programme, will I gaze with my old demeanour upon those who excuse 70s racism as "accidental". We were all culpable.

Cradle to Grave was enjoyable, but little more. Liked it, but perhaps I'd had enough of the perfections of 70s recreation. Perhaps I've just never been that in love with Danny Baker, whose story of a Bermondsey adolescence was way less magical than Lenny Henry's. Loved the tortoise and the tipping teapots though. Possibly a sentence never to be written again.

Funnier than Baker, funnier than Henry, have always been Enfield and Whitehouse, who had an hour to look back on themselves with the savage glee of hindsight in An Evening With Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. They didn't have much to bemoan. The posho stuff (lovely skit about upmarket novelties) balanced all, I think, the prole-scum stuff. They even took the rip, and even a bit nastily at that, out of a couple of our saints, Lenny Henry and Stephen Hawking. Lenny was played as blacked-up, possessed of an impenetrable Dudley accent and stuck in a Travelodge bed. Ouch. Stevey-boy lolled with lipstick on, and swore energetically. Satire, despite the sainted Tom Lehrer's pronouncement, is not dead. It is, as long as Enfield and Whitehouse (and Punt, Dennis, Iannucci, Jupp) survive, not even smelling that bad.

Taskmaster is the kind of Dave thing that shouldn't quite work but is actually wildly stupid fun. Mainly thanks to Alex Horne, late of so much splendid radio, and Greg Davies, and regulars such as Frank Skinner and Romesh Ranganathan. And eating a watermelon in a minute, and having to paint a horse while riding a horse and other activities that would have been unsuited to, say, Queen Victoria's funeral. A winner.

Limmy interview: daft punk

In Scotland he's a national hero up there with Andy Murray, and now he's the name on everyone's lips in London. Here are six things you need to know about Limmy, the man behind the comedy book of the year.