Frank Skinner

Miranda Hart popped up all over the TV at Christmas, pratfalling her way through her own Yuletide special and the start of her third series. Not to mention Call The Midwife. Yet she still has time to drop by and do verbal battle with fellow guests John Craven and Reggie Yates as they try to persuade host Frank Skinner to dump their personal pet hates into Room 101. Bluetooth gets Yates's goat, Craven loathes Kindles, while Hart would like to dispose of her own breasts, which have been known to clap at inappropriate moments. Such fun.

You can't invite Miranda Hart on this kind of panel show and not expect her to dominate. She is one of three guests hoping to convince host Frank Skinner that their pet hates should be consigned to the vault of loathing - it's the new format they launched last year, remember?

So we get the usual airing of comedy grudges, but Hart breaks new ground when she nominates not just smartphones and pineapple on pizza but, in the wildcard round, her own breasts, bemoaning all the times they have embarrassed her (once when she was rolling over in bed naked, they clapped). Skinner, whose role is normally to argue on behalf of the things the guests hate, looks floored.

Meanwhile, Reggie Yates reveals a hatred of drinking yogurt (!I don't want a cup of gone-off stuff!) as well as the ubiquitous hip-hop handshake. It's left to John Craven to play it straight. He gets the biggest cheer of the night from the studio audience when he nominates e-books.

It's not often you see Frank Skinner completely lost for words. So full marks to Miranda Hart for reducing him and her male fellow panellists to utter embarrassment with her unexpected nomination for a pet hate to consign to Room 101.

The re-imagined format is the same as it was last year when Frank Skinner stepped into Paul Merton's shoes. Three guests compete to have items in particular categories sent to pretend oblivion. Presenters John Craven and Reggie Yates also gamely do the business tonight. But it's a tougher gig than it looks.

The secret to being a really good Room 101 guest is being able to be amusingly irate about some quite trivial detail of modern life, without tipping over the edge into actual, genuine, scary anger.

The late Peter Cook calmly pointing to the mind-numbing dullness of the countryside - "has this film been speeded up?" - is still the gold standard by which all guests will be judged and Reggie Yates, bless him, is no Peter Cook. But then how het up is it possible to get about the existence of yogurt drinks?

It's hardly a dream line-up to kick off the new series of the Frank Skinner-steered Room 101: Reggie Yates, Miranda Hart and John Craven. It's a kind of post-Cameron vision of Middle England - a well-spoken young black man, a well-spoken, sexually unthreatening woman and a well-spoken John Craven, the Hawkshead catalogue of broadcasting.

Predictably, none of this lot has anything much to get worked up about: it's difficult to imagine any of them getting worked up about much ever, but really it's the format that's at fault. Room 101 doesn't work as a panel show: it needs individuals to warm to their theme, then accidentally-on-purpose reveal a colossal, Kenneth Williams-style inner Looney Tunes life. It also leaves Skinner with little to do, though he does manage to get in a decent gag about the Nazis to remind people that there are whole dark volumes of his comedy that rarely get opened these days, especially on the BBC.

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When a comedian chats with someone in the front row of the audience, it's often the funniest part of the show. The performer spontaneously proving their smarts is a thrill.

Now imagine a panel game where comics grill punters who sit in designated seats and have been chosen because their lives or personalities are funny. Sounds great in theory, but you can't regiment banter. Even with Frank Skinner on the panel and Jack Dee hosting, every joke here is forced - until it emerges that one of the stooges used to be a porn actor, after which it's groansome easy wins all the way.

A new comedy series in which three comedians (this week Frank Skinner, Josh Widdicombe and Roisin Conaty), presided over by Jack Dee, mock the lives and habits of four selected (and willing) audience members. Each round sees the spectator with least comic value being voted off. Desperately unfunny.

Neil (Frank Skinner) and Kim (Katherine Parkinson, The IT Crowd) are back and their verbal jousting is more combative than ever. This couple of bookworms have no children to interrupt their thought processes and so have plenty of time to flash their razor-sharp rapiers of verbal brilliance until there's only one man - or woman - left standing.

As ever, the trigger for a tiff can be as harmless as a nursery rhyme: who'd have thought that Jack Sprat's decision to eat no fat made his wife a repressed woman? The spat that starts with the Sprats ends on a bonding note, where both Neil and Kim agree that singing songs while strumming an acoustic guitar results in painful squirming among one's associates and should always be avoided. The intellectual face-offs might still be full-blown, but now there's an inkling of the love and mutual respect that holds this odd couple together.