Euan Ferguson

The link between The Apprentice and Show Me the Funny was suddenly obvious. First, we have a competition for entrepreneurs who can't... entrepren. Then, on Show Me the Funny, we were introduced to a succession of comedian-contestants who weren't funny.

This "Show/Funny" thing, an attempt to find Britain's best new stand-up in six weeks, was a bizarrely cack-handed production, which didn't let us see any of the contestants be funny or even perform. During all their on-stage performances, someone called ]Jason Manford was being filmed in the wings, trying to be funny about the people out there failing to be funny, but who we couldn't see failing to be funny, which would have been more fun. Finally, funnily, we got one brief clip of a Spanish/Welsh chap managing to alienate a roomful of drunk Liverpudlian women. Ignacio Lopez got it wrong. He strode, swayed, rubbed his crotch, told them he was half-Welsh, half-Spanish, all sexy. "Some of you might recognise me as the barman you slept with two years ago in Magaluf! If you don't have my number, ask the lady on your left!" This was an audience which would have potentially weed itself at mention of the word "sausage", as ever-punchable guest judge Jimmy Tarbuck knows. Yet Liverpool is still strong on nuance, gentility and intent, and Liverpool hasn't been as quiet since the day after it was bombed. I'm surprised Lopez left alive. There were no contenders with wit other than the brave and lucky Ellie Taylor, who is also a former model. For some, life works.

Rewind TV: Sirens

Sirens' paramedics had this viewer gripped. Could they please now rescue the female roles?

Not so much scene as scene-stealer of the week was undoubtedly Robbie Coltrane, single-handedly lifting Lead Balloon (BBC2), the rather smart yet unaccountably underrated Jack Dee thing, into a new stratosphere.

How much would you want to be held hostage in a prison library by heavy jailbird Coltrane, who only wanted to like you and viscerally psychoanalyse you? I can think of worse things, chief among them having to ever watch any more of that thing called The Marriage Ref on ITV on Saturdays, utter hound (the original, produced in the US by Jerry Seinfeld, was also an utter hound and, blissfully, allows me to say that I was smart for never understanding the niche of Seinfeld).

Jack Dee, the person, actually looked physically scared in front of Robbie Coltrane, the person. I can understand. I once gave Coltrane my favourite clutch-pencil because he expressed a faint interest in it. Dee's fabulously picaresque pizza order, done under similar scared-boy circumstances, sent, when eaten, Coltrane to sleep. Allowed Dee to escape for another episode: and, I would hope, another series.

BAFTA TV special / Miranda Hart: Heart to Hart

She's the undisputed comedy queen of the small screen. But what's Miranda Hart like in real life? Does she fall over as much? Does she have so many tiny friends? Here, she talks about class, looking for love and being a "ghastly" late developer.

Ross Noble: 'I was lucky I was crap at school'

Ross Noble talks about motorbikes, Australian manners and his fearless approach to stand-up.

Book Review: The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry

The second volume of Stephen Fry's memoirs recalls his Cambridge years and rise to fame in perfect prose and excruciating honesty.

Review: Grandma's House

Simon Amstell makes a better writer than an actor in his new sitcom.

I know I reviewed this at the beginning of the run, but I do hope you've all been watching, in the six intervening weeks, Rev, one of the highlights of the year. Only this masterfully written programme could have got away with offering, to a prime-time Tuesday night Beeb audience, an episode centred on the word "ontological", and have the lovely Tom Hollander quite unafraid to say it.

His questions to God, during his existential crisis, didn't just include the usual earthquake/Aids creation unanswerables. Instead, they were along the lines of: "Why do you allow there to be kids who don't know what the second world war is?" "Why are there no more bumblebees?" "Why do Nazis always live until they're 96?" If this isn't recommissioned I'll have a boob job.

Glorious: and a tragedy that the Mitchell chap in the last sketch, about pedantry - he took it upon himself to shoot employees who said "haitch" and "expresso", quite right - shot himself over an infelicitation, because I love pedantry and wanted this sketch to go on for the run, for the rest of my life actually.

David Mitchell really suits a flat cap and just-so tweeds, by the way, as do we all surely. In this garb, even when playing the grotesque Monsieur Garnier, greedy boss of a brilliant lab team which wants to do good rather than invent new twitches on the names for hair colouration, he looks even better than the dreamboat-imaginings of every 30something woman I know who wants him, which is all of them. But I won't go on about this because I once had the misfortune of being ordered by a friend to set them up on a date, and the setting-up supper ended with such exaggerated politesse on both his and my parts - grammar man, shoot me - that my buttocks haven't quite unclenched. Sorry again David.

"Another crazy half-hour with..." "And now, it's time to put on your wacky hats and..." The word "zany" once made an appearance. It had the same effect as hearing a staid man announce he was suddenly going to be "spontaneous" to impress his wife by serenading her at work or some such, i.e. had the effect of making you very much not want to be there when it happened.

Actually, it's fab, this new series. I am an utter instant convert, and Tuesday evenings are going to be pointless fun for a while. Vic fine; Bob terrific; new scorer odd and intriguing, Ulrika fabulously knowing. The one shock was seeing guest Si King, the bigger, more Geordie, even hairier one of the Hairy Bikers, on his own. I adore Simon and Dave, not least because they once cooked me a fabulous meal. But it's the first time I've ever seen one of them on their own, uncoupled, and it's just wrong, as if Ant without Dec had gone solo but far worse; like rock without roll, mince without tatties, assault without battery.