Euan Ferguson

Comparisons have been drawn between Not Safe For Work and The Office, and W1A, even The Thick Of It. But I tend to think the roots of this workplace comedy-drama extend even Britishly further, to Lucky Jim, and to Billy Liar. It is deeply, slowly, funny. Zawe Ashton (Fresh Meat) is rightly the star, but may be show-stolen by her old nemesis Danny, the fake Muslim, and perhaps the least appealing fictional character to have hit our screens since they had to make up George Osborne. It's triffic.

Episodes has so much going for it. It's co-written by David Crane, the clever writer mainly responsible for Friends! It has Joey from Friends in the shape of Matt LeBlanc playing himself, Matt, as an older, greyer and slappably unwiser version of Joey from Friends! It has Tamsin Greig! And Kathleen Rose Perkins! And it's really underwhelming!

Part of the problem must be that, while we Brits relished every last drop of the earlier battles surrounding the fictional couple Tamsin and Stephen Mangan's sharp fictional script being dumbed down for America, the real US scriptwriters might now feel a touch of possibly justifiable unease at all the shrewd Briton/whalethick Statesider gags. And thus have to concentrate on affairs, and Matt/Joey's vaulting new stupidities. But it's a fresh series, and I'll let it settle in, and admittedly Mr Mangan's facial reactions to Matt's financial woes last week - turned out he'd been scammed for half his lifetime earnings, and thus had "just" $31m left - were as pricelessly and stoically old-country as old maids cycling through the morning mists on cheap and broken bikes.

No Offence is Paul "Shameless" Abbott's not-at-all-for-everyone but deeply funny take on that most perilous of portmanteaus, the police comedy. It's done splendidly in America's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but there played mainly for laughs. Here, it's more serious - can't get much more cloacal than a serial murderer targeting Down's syndrome girls in rainy Manc - and the humour is more staccato and scatological. A terrific Joanna Scanlan is unapologetically, vividly, chunky, sweaty and sweary, and deeply real - in that one can, simultaneously, laugh, sympathise and do a little sickie in one's own mouth when her DI character very publicly spritzes with, in turn, breath spray and vaginal deodorant, then announces an urgent loo visit because she got the two mixed up. Elaine Cassidy as Dinah, the Polish-descended DC, is in possession of the cojones, and what passes in that world for the glamour. If Abbott's tricksy thinking, to have a deep vein of below-skirt humour mesh with an otherwise bleak-indeed crime drama, is to be fully realised - and I think it is - these two alone look to be a dream pairing.

Peter Kay's Car Share is a delight, with some bite, and Kay's perennial attention to northern detail. It's a shame not to be able to say more, and I will, later. But all six episodes were launched on iPlayer at once, for folk to binge watch, yet all deleted from that catch-up service on Tuesday night in an inexplicable move worthy of W1A. They're now limited to real-time Wednesday and Thursday nights, and are being trickled out on catch-up, but still, if you can get your head around all that - my own brain is starting to itch - worth it.

There exists a comedians' in-joke, only very slightly up its own jacksie, in which one asks: "What's the secret of good com..." only to have the second interrupt with the shout: "Timing!" But that is, indeed, the very singular secret of comedy, timing, and W1A, in its second outing, gets it just-so, in the same way that there is only one just-so way in which to shoot cuffs, tap dance slowly, play Chopin or excise a pineocytoma.

Writer and director John Morton has, admittedly, the best of sublime comedy talent to work with. Hugh Bonneville, Nina Sosanya, Jessica Hynes, Jason Watkins. But he has, in this crammed hour, not only to re-thumbnail the personalities with a wizard's thumb but get the timing beyond reproach. To this end, the entire cast are apparently "invited" to spend up to seven hours rehearsing 10 seconds of rapid-fire dialogue. I'm sure the above four could improvise delightfully - been lucky enough to meet two of them, one over drinks after a funeral, another over an extremely fun lunch, and what different people they are, thus what fine actors - but the Morton gene calls for just-so, and the BBC, bravely risking much to rip the ferret out of itself in this wince-out-loud comedy, acceded, in what may well become its finest confection since Fawlty Towers.

Thus, for instance, the five just-so bollards. In more minor hands, the sequence in which the black Range Rover of HRH, an (unseen) Charles, is stymied at the entrance to New Broadcasting House, inside which the welcoming committee have become hogtied by their own insane security protocols, could have been simple farce. The anti-terrorist bollards would just have jumped up and down or spiked Charlie's RR in the sump. Instead, Dave (Andrew Brooke), head of Beeb security, aided only by a ridiculous smartphone and the meaningless catchphrase "we are status-active", manages with a stoic glower to "relent" bollards 2 and 4. And then, in quiet desperation, Nos 1, 3 and 5. There is a full nine-second pause. All bollards down. Then bollard 3 reappears, like a giant erection (as if there's any other kind).

There is glorious timing here, yes, but there's also humanity. Was I alone in quietly cheering whip-smart Lucy (Sosanya) in being the first to make it to the royal meet-and-greet, having left the three witches trapped in their own personalities and also a non-revolving revolving door? Or in feeling, admittedly slightly, a twitch sorry for Will, the good-looking, charming intern with the kind of shoe-size IQ even a mother would struggle to love? If you didn't see it, I just feel for you. Do so. David Tennant's perky voiceovers, dry as sandblasted Ryvita, are worth the licence fee alone.

Ballot Monkeys was sharp, as would befit a writing credit for Andy Hamilton, and thus trumped and trumps ITV's Newzoids so far. Again served by a great ensemble, it was hampered only by being so close not only to topicality but to truth. Stronger, Fairer, Nicer is the slogan on the Lib-Dem battle bus and a blistering Ben Miller couldn't better negate any of those adjectives. The Tory bus has Hugh Dennis as the head of something involving "delivery", although you were invited to set your watches back to 1954 as a bereft "women's spokesman" had to crane her neck against the bus-rack just to be heard past his dullard alpha shoulders. Labour? Just constantly worried about the reaction on the doorstep to happy warrior Miliband. Andy Nyman's Ukip press officer is not so much fighting Twitter storms - most of them engendered by the bus's other occupants - as engaged in a Sisyphean bout of Whack-a-Mole. If only politics could be this much fun. If only Labour hadn't sold everyone down the river. Adapted to the paradigm contiguities of a modern vibrant age. Sold everyone down the river.

The Delivery Man is that most endangered of animals, a seriously funny ITV comedy, as in I laughed out loud, and I very seldom do that. The premise is simple. He's a copper who's suddenly retrained as a male midwife, and that's every bit as funny as it sounds, and must have been enough to get it past at least two phalanxes of ITV comedy bods deluded enough to give money to Keith Lemon rather than taking him behind a barn and hitting him with an axe.

Turns out it's quiet genius. This is partly down to Darren Boyd's pitch-perfect stutter-timing. Half way through his early watercooler moment with putative love interest Lisa (Aisling Bea), he compliments her gauchely on her selection of Dr Pepper - "Good choice. Did you know that Vietnamese prostitutes favoured this for its antispermicidal qualities?" On he stutters, with his tallness, insisting on comparing her favourably to a Vietnamese prostitute but still managing to insert the phrase "vaginal douche". And I suddenly knew I had to record the whole series. Others in the cast - Alex McQueen, Llewella Gideon - add gleeful panache. How ever did they get through the ITV "comedy" net?

Inside No 9 was a perfect little half-hour of claustrophobic grand guignol, and Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the bastard love-children of Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl. A Eurostar six-berth couchette from Paris to Bourg-St-Maurice, a scarily thin, scarily ambitious doctor, a fat farting Kraut, a northern top-bunk couple anticipating their mad daughter's wedding, Jack Whitehall as a spoilt-posh delivering seriously undeliverable lines with entirely believable gusto, an unnerving twist in the tail. Beautifully, beautifully dark, and guiltily funny, and nobody now does it better.

A good week for Channel 4, actually. Caitlin Moran, who will soon surely be so well known she can go about being known by just her first name (just so's you know, the opening syllable is "Cat", as in "cat", not "Kate", for befuddling but I seem to remember nice reasons), has again given us something good, in addition to journalism and her runaway bestseller, How to Be a Woman, in the shape of a highly moreish comedy.

Raised By Wolves, essentially the story of her own Wolverhampton childhood and co-written with her sister Caz, aims to celebrate that relentlessly ignored televisual beast, the witty and bright working class. It won't be to absolutely everyone's taste - bigots who like to lump the poor under the adjective "feckless", thickos who like their humour less subtle, that distinct super-breed of men who still think lady-periods unmentionable - but it was very sweet, will get even funnier, and is crackling with talent to celebrate, in young Helen Monks and Alexa Davies and this opener's standout star, Pulling's Rebekah Staton. I worry only that the trend, in both broadcasting and newspapers, is increasingly biased these happy days against female writers who are a) terrifyingly bright and funny, and b) technically below the salt, in terms of privileged ability to fund themselves through three-year internships for sod-all pay. Thank goodness historically, then, for Caitlin, for Julie Burchill, for our own Barbara Ellen, but shall we see many of their likes again?

Nurse was both unexpected and wholly predictable, in that you could put safer money on Paul Whitehouse (and Esther Coles) excelling than on any Cheltenham nag. Mental health has of course been explored with increasing and justifiable interest, in comedy and drama and documentary, but seldom, Jo Brand excluded, with such bittersweet wit.

Whitehouse, playing many of what one of his characters is more than happy to call the "nutters", catches, with astonishing nuance, the great many tics and self-serving justifications, and grievances (and impairments) both wholly real and wholly imagined, of the umbrella under which we still lump the impossibly diverse characteristics of the "mentally ill". Coles, as Nurse, exudes, not least in her snatched in-car meals and phone calls, the scale of the Sisyphean task she has chosen. As so often these days, we're left questioning whether circumstance begets mental ill-health, or vice quite versa.

I hesitate ever to use the word "valuable" of a comedy, but it is.