Euan Ferguson

The Wrong Mans is not unfunny. There was much to smile about, and a terrific poke against Top Gear. But I think the move to America has harmed the show. Two council workers being caught up, in Britain, inside a network of drugs and kidnappings and bombs is borderline funny/credible. Move them to Texas, and to a Texas jail, with real racist thugs, and for it to work comedically one has to reduce the real villains to cartoon dolts. Which works less well as a thriller. It was always going to be an uneasy thing to pull off, a comedy-thriller - there's a long and ignoble history of failures in that genre - but earlier Corden and co-writer Mathew Baynton managed it, and last week they didn't, not so much. Maybe it's just that I don't like James Corden, a judgment about which he will surely lose sleep.

Harry Hill was the perfect Professor in The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, a gag-a-minute Heath Robinson come to life with some delightfully grown-up gags, and some delightfully childish ones, and I wished, while watching, that I was 12 years old again and able to revel in simple glees.

His pretty village, Pagwell, is impossibly representative of an England lost for decades now, and David Mitchell and Ben Miller impossibly representative of cartoon villainy, but I didn't mind in the slightest because Norman Hunter's children's books have been re-rendered as impossibly good fun. I almost used the word zany but I've got through a whole 'nother year without using it, hurrah. Oops.

I didn't have to starve for too long in search of equally gamey broth, in the reliable shape of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror: White Christmas. Mr Brooker takes few prisoners when it comes to those possessed of pygmy imaginations, which is meet and right for grown-up telly. So within 90 minutes we were introduced to the concept of "blocking" an individual as one would an ex-Facebook friend, but actually doing so in real life (thanks to everyone in the near future having chosen to implant so-called Z-Eyes, hooked up of course to the net: do keep up); the blockee appears only as a greyed-out shadow and may neither call nor approach.

Then to the concept of extracting an "egg" of consciousness, a kind of Mini-Me, purely to toil in a tiny, white, closed cyberjail at the tasks of keeping the real-life Me fed and watered and kept at the right temperature and with the toast done just so: basically, the concept of outsourcing a small twitch of one's own soul, the better to keep body and... body together. Already we'd addressed the issues of slavery, alienation, the speeding up of time (and thus, when there's absolutely nothing to do, the creation of pathological boredom), the inadvisability of taking anyone's advice on dating, and that was within about seven minutes, before we even got on to the concept of Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall stuck in Ice Station Zebra at Christmas, caning the port.

These actors, and this in its entirety, were phenomenal, but there were so many fine ideas, both uplifting and dystopian, that I can't quickly do them justice - other than to offer the obvious thought that it's not the technology: it's us. And to observe that Mr Brooker must be becoming mildly fed up at having his technological imaginings superseded every six months. Google, do be careful what you wish for: when the gods wish to punish us, first they answer our prayers.

Brian Pern: A Life in Rock was very funny indeed, and featured great cameos from, among others, Martin Freeman, Kathy Burke and Tim Rice. It's splenetic, hilarious and just wrong. Can there be yet another urgent need to send up the pomp of the prog-rock years when it has already been spoofed so sublimely by Spinal Tap, and The Comic Strip's Bad News Tour?

Simon Day is behind this, and very good he is too, and you should watch it if you haven't watched any other satire on 70s musical vainglory. But if you have, you'll simply be asking yourself: why?

Boomers, a comedy-by-numbers thing set in Norfolk and apparently phoned in by a pig's bladder on a stick, is about comfortably-off fiftysomething baby-boomers going through non-crises. It features Nigel Planer, Alison Steadman and Russ Abbot, and diminishes all of them.

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse skewered the entire output of BBC2 over the past 50 years in Harry and Paul's Story of the Twos, and not even that kindly. Enfield, as Alan Bennett, as a Talking Heads Stalin, torn between curtain-fussery and genocide, was the most surreal vision this perfect pair have ever concocted, but worked: as did their evisceration of such sacred cows as Monty Python, I Claudius and Have I Got News For You. It was wonderfully written, and brave, and I'd like to think that all the famous targets decked themselves with laughter. Mr Cleese may have even ventured a smile.

Episodes shouldn't, perhaps, work. The tale of a husband-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who are persuaded, with a refreshing lack of reluctance, to sell out and take their fictionally Bafta-winning (and very British) comedy to Hollywood, thence to have it "made over" with gleeful disregard for such restrictive critical concerns as, for instance, taste - is surely too close to the experiences of many homegrown authors and film-makers for the memories to be anything other than vile at best. The Greig/Mangan original comedy, for instance, fictionally starred Richard Griffiths as a tweedy teacher in his twilight: transposed, the writers are both starstruck and horrified to find the grinsome Matt LeBlanc, Joey from Friends, in his place.

But it does work - and how. Partly through the subtlety of the writing, by Jeffrey Klarik and his partner David Crane, also of Friends fame: Friends, of course, wasn't written with British audiences in mind, but might as well have been, and its appreciation of "our" sense of humour (and our preconceptions about how the Americans could never quite "do" it) meant it became a crossover dream. As Episodes is now proving: it's been garnering much critical praise over there. Partly, too, thanks to the chemistry between Greig, Mangan and Matt LeBlanc, who's playing a lightly fictionalised version of "Matt LeBlanc" - kindly, vainglorious, deeply shallow to the extent that he has drunkenly invited his crazed stalker into his bed.

And one of the simple delights lies in seeing how far Tamsin Greig has come, from stoic work as Debbie Aldridge in The Archers, to a revelatory gift for comedy as Fran in the sublime Black Books, to - ta-dah! - sunny La-La-Land: Toto, we're not in Ambridge any more. This is just telly that makes you smile. Incidentally, one of the gags involves Matt, arrested on a borderline DUI charge, to be met with a beaming desk-sergeant who proudly boasts that his sister was nurse No 4 or something in one Friends episode. Matt does his winning best to pretend to remember her. (He's still booked.) On Good Morning Britain the other day, Matt popped up, only to have Ben Shephard remind him that he, Ben, had once "played" an interviewer in one Friends episode. Matt did his winning best to pretend to remember him. A trouper.

This phenomenally darker, third (and possibly final) series ended, as was mete, on a hanging note of cochineal bittersweet. Tom Hollander's Adam has pretty much lost the parish but regained a few friendships: friendships he didn't particularly want in the first place - archdeacon Rob, and lovely archfiend Colin (Steve Evets), than whom few supporting characters in a "sitcom" have ever been more subtly drawn or well portrayed. But their dogged belief in him, now reciprocated with genuine warmth, has been one of the many lessons on our journey through Rev, and at times it's been a gruelling one. Crucially, of course, he's regained the forgiving friendship of his wife, Alex: Olivia Colman, of course, with that trainstopping smile. "You just stopped being a vicar for Lent."

Never twee, always in surgeon-skilled hands, and it would be a crime greater than all those above [cop shows previously mentioned in the review] not to have someone thinking furiously about the machinations required to get Adam back to our screens for a fourth series.

Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns's Cardinal Burns, on to a welcome return series, is still just a sketch show. Hit-and-miss, as even the best in this genre tend to be, but it was more former than latter: nudging a little near to the bone admittedly, but it's on at 10.30pm. The one where a post-office storage-depot worker has to collect a parcel from the bowels of what turns out to be an elaborate game of Crystal Maze was gleeful, and too long, which was its point, and I do hope this becomes a running gag about where people go when they're off collecting utterly simple stuff: your kettle from Argos (it's there! I can see it on the belt!), your x-rays from next door. Sinister watchmakers (as if there's any other kind) limping into the "back shop".

Derek splits judgment: some see it as heartwarming and touchingly witty, others as gormlessly mawkish and actionably insulting to the elderly and mentally challenged. I'm in the second camp. But this opener to the inexplicably recommissioned second series had some decent moments - the extraneous characters are well-drawn - and might grow to become something better than its genesis, if only bloody Derek wasn't clogging up the screen all the time with his idiot-savant saccharine bullcrap.

I happen to be one of the few apparent remaining fans of Ricky Gervais, but can today say, hand on heart, this would be a better series if Ricky Gervais wasn't in it.