Euan Ferguson

In and Out of the Kitchen transfers from Radio 4 not wholly successfully, but there's ample time enough yet and Miles Jupp is amply talented enough to make it very funny indeed. The conceit - a mildly pompous cookery writer, puttering with amiably passive aggression between boyfriend, agent and deadlines - works well enough but, seen in real-time rather than radio-imagined, it is just so relentlessly London middle-class as to be both its main point and chief drawback. The recipe asides work wonderfully well: the agent's predictable Salman Rushdie phone-gags work as well as avocado cheesecake.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how awful was the thing entitled Pompidou. I might be a little biased, because this pompous-bloke-fallen-on-hard-times sitcom featured three of my very least favourite things - slapstick, deference and the inexplicably beloved Beeb pet Matt Lucas. Even on an objective reading, however, this misguided and ill-disguised attempt to flog to the BBC Worldwide and children's market a sub-Bean, definitely sub-Hulot, half-hour lash-up of silly voices, snobbery and painfully telegraphed misunderstandings made me yearn for the comparatively Shavian sophistications of that exaggerated, whistling, carefree saunter Norman Wisdom would adopt six seconds before falling into a manhole. Insulting to children, insulting even to French people, who seem to like this kind of stuff, and you could find more intellectual creativity in 10 minutes of Bananas in Pyjamas.

Asylum, despite Ben Miller, isn't (yet) funny. The premise is fine, the Julian Assange story played for laughs (not that the real-life tale involves any less bathos, hubris and other words the Greeks did best). Miller plays it for high-minded pompous, as a GCHQ whistleblower holed up for 14 months in the London embassy of "El Rico", a banana republic which purely wants to stick a finger up to America but finds Dan Hern (Miller) an increasingly ungrateful and unwelcome guest, simply bored and boring and having lost his media cachet. So El Rico - look at the funny banana republic, welcoming to an embassy ball the funny North Koreans! - also brings to shelter one Ludo Backslash, a mittel-European wanted by urgent Hollywood dollars for having streamed for fun every major film for years.

Much of the conception is by Kayvan Novak, who also appears as the "herpes in a suit" ambassador's plotting son, and Dustin Demri-Burns is the amiable Backslash, and these two alone, never mind Miller, should have guaranteed laughs. But it was written by none of them, and that shows: it has too few quirks, a too-obvious incompetent lawyer, one plot device (a misheard word) so old it's got rust on its moss, and too many stereotypes which were old in the 70s. Come out of the 70s! With your hands UP.

Bob Servant, despite Brian Cox, and my having loved his first outing, isn't (yet) funny. Cox and Miller are deeply talented comedy actors, let down here by pilot scripts. I know that the writer of the second, Neil Forsyth, is capable of far greater nuanced stuff, and a fine pawky Dundonian sense of humour, than which there are few finer this side of Brooklyn, and can only hope that he and Cox haven't already alienated audiences. BBC Four prides itself on "experimental", but these should have been sure things. Wh'appen?

Rory Bremner did his best, and that's always almost by definition a hit-and-miss affair on TV. You can get sharper satire from Steve Punt on radio's The Now Show, and he manages it weekly. But there were some grand moments, not least his Cameron (whose voice he's now pretty much mastered; less so Miliband), here attempting to find a Blairite third way. "People are fed up with the old politics, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But both can happen."

Catastrophe, a new something-or-other - romcom? Chaucerian cautionary tale? - was, disappointingly, terrific. I had wanted to be able to dismiss it with an easy snide "Catastrophe 'nuff said" or similar - actually I hope I'd never have written anything so nuff-naff - but co-writers/co-stars Sharon Horgan and the American Rob Delaney have created, with one random pregnancy, two delightful characters who bleed authenticity.

Mapp and Lucia was phenomenal, successive nights of the most deliciously moreish television made last year. The adaptation by Steve Pemberton of E.F. Benson's exquisitely flensed comedy of manners, set in Rye in the 1920s/30s (and it really is still that lovely), when a certain rarefied form of life actually depended on a bustling church noticeboard for its every social, spiritual, ethical, sartorial and sexual sustenance, could have been carried by the eponymous leads alone for the whole three nights.

Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women - ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death - caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns. Richardson in particular was again phenomenal; her silent lipsticked mouth spoke volumes. It was rainbowed and beaming when happily and hissily besmirching her "friend" with the sarcastic term "precious one", or even when genuinely happy, high on unkindness, after a rare coup: but its cochineal would plummet, in repose, to a clownish moue, a faded curtain of dried lip-lines rusted with frustration. But Chancellor was no slouch; even though she won 90% of the battles, when scorned her wrath was ungovernable, and would have had 90% of ovaries (and every testicle around) fleeing for the Downs.

As I said, they could have carried it themselves, but there was glorious support. Pemberton himself as proto-gay Georgie; Poppy Miller and Mark Gatiss and Nicholas Woodeson, and Rye itself. The plots, such as they were - a dodgy Indian guru, an art competition, a something involving the Prince of Wales - were negligibly delightful. But the subplots - the mutating fashions for friendships, brief fads, the power of money, benign unacknowledged homosexuality, misappreciated appreciation for what passes for intellect (or class), the joy of witchy bitchiness - never more relevant. E.F. Benson left a little more of a canon than this: please, bring it on, and leave Downton looking like the Titanic after the feet got damp.

Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench acted together, and wonderfully, in Esio Trot, an essentially children's book brought to the screen. Roald Dahl's tale of late-blooming love, revolving around a tortoise (spell it backwards), with its incremental-growth trick giving me goosepimples for the sublime The Twits, was undermined by the inclusion of actor James Corden and writer Richard Curtis, but not much: Dahl's intention survived, just. He was a wonderfully dark man.

So, Miranda's over, and leaves us in a fine tradition - Fawlty Towers, The Office - of going on just long enough and no longer, and creating a newly Hollywood-bound personality. Some fusspot critics adopted airs of frenetic postmodern sophistication towards what was, after all, a comedy show. I loved it, every bit, not least for allowing me to finally "get" - albeit only a bit - slapstick. I especially loved it for every reason the detractors resented: its retro nature, its channelling of Eric Morecambe (she even managed, along with his trademark deadpans to camera, to slap Stevie's cheeks) and its big, warm, sexy lunk of a star.

It ended rightly on a high (she married Gary, needless to say) and included bits of girly fun (meh), sharp observation (yay!) and, actually, a twitch more seriousness than has been usual. "That is not being a child," she says at one stage, grown strangely grave. "Sometime the world just needs to be... jollied." Indeed it does, and I raise my glass to Miranda Hart, producer Sarah Fraser, director Mandie Fletcher and all the other splendid women involved: 2015 deserves to be their brilliant year.

Review: Mapp & Lucia, Esio Tort, 2014 Wipe, Miranda

Reviews of shows over the New Year period.