Geoffrey Palmer

"She just likes working so if someone offers her a job, she takes it. She's crazy," says Geoffrey Palmer affectionately in an attempt to explain why Dame Judi Dench has had so many disparate roles during her lengthy career. Having started out as a Shakespearean actor, she cornered the market in gritty TV drama before becoming the queen of middle-class British sitcoms.

Then Hollywood caught up and cast her as M in the Bond films, since when she's played Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I and Iris Murdoch, among others. Her peers, including Simon Callow and Samantha Bond all talk fondly, telling stories of her mischievous side, illustrated by the occasional outtake that'll bring a smile. "You always wanted to be in Judi's gang because they had the most fun," says As Time Goes By's Philip Bretherton. And you can absolutely see why.

From classical stage work to Hollywood blockbusters, 77-year-old Judith Olivia Dench is our finest actress working today. This documentary charts the Dame's distinguished career via the roles she has played over the past half century. We discover how she disliked drama at school in York but "had a go" and rose to prominence in 1960s theatre. She impressed during an early small screen appearance in Z Cars, which led to later TV work including Cranford and A Fine Romance, alongside late husband Michael Williams. Her career was redefined, though, by an extraordinary run of films: whipping James Bond into shape in GoldenEye; her acclaimed turn as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown; and the Oscar-winning Elizabeth II in Shakespeare in Love. This otherwise pedestrian programme is made by the quality of the clips which include last year's Proms tribute to Stephen Sondheim, out-takes showcasing Dench's dirty laugh and footage from the original stage production of Cabaret. Michael Parkinson, Simon Callow and Geoffrey Palmer also share their anecdotes. It's preceded at 7.00pm by another chance to see the final episode of As Time Goes By.

It's Christmas at St Saviour's and someone has stolen the Three Wise Men's camels from the Nativity display. Vicar Adam Smallbone refuses to be downhearted -maybe the missing beasts can be replaced by cows? "A Wise Man crossing the desert on a cow?" blusters outraged parishioner Adoha.

That's Adam, a man for whom there are never problems, there are only solutions. But even his legendary compassion and good nature are stretched by a truly testing Christmas. He loses a friend, he is head-butted by another, supposed, mate and his father-in-law (a magnificently austere Geoffrey Palmer) arrives unexpectedly. Worse, Midnight Mass is disrupted by drunks and Adam (Tom Hollander) melts down in a spectacular, funny/sad, Adam-type way.

Christmas specials of television comedies are so rarely special, or even Christmassy, but Rev is a fount of goodness and kindness all year round and especially at Christmas. You'll have a few tears and a heart as warmed as a plum pudding by the end.

"Any chance of a festive blow job?" inquires a tired Adam as he gets home from attending to his flock. Not really, what with Alex's grump-faced, "social hand grenade" of a dad, Martin (Geoffrey Palmer), having unexpectedly turned up to spend Christmas with the couple. If that weren't bad enough, Adam's diary is packed, necessitating 5.30am starts every day. The pressure will surely tell, especially with midnight mass, treated by booze-sodden parishioners as "the religious equivalent of a kebab", approaching. A Christmas episode that's genuinely heartwarming rather than toe-curlingly sentimental.

Dame Judi Dench may be a Hollywood superstar now, but to say she's paid her dues is a bit of an understatement. This documentary, which spans her 50-year career, shows her first TV appearance in Z Cars and her time in gentle sitcom-land with A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By. But it wasn't until she became "a newcomer in her 60s" playing M in Goldeneye and bagging awards for Mr Brown and Shakespeare In Love that she was unleashed as an international star. Friends and fans Michael Parkinson, Geoffrey Palmer and Simon Callow bow down.

Spare a thought for men of the cloth this Christmas. Judging by this superb series finale, it's the most stressful time of year for a vicar. As Reverend Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) enters his first Advent in the London parish of St Saviour's, festive nerves are fraying. Camels keep being stolen from the church Nativity, he's up at the crack of dawn every day to cook breakfast for the homeless, and resident wino Colin (the show's cult figure, played with pitch-perfect pathos by Steve Evets) plans on being drunk until Twelfth Night. Adam is out of pocket, permanently hungover and under pressure for the seasonal collection plate to hit its financial targets.

The last thing he needs is a surprise house guest in the form of his grumpy "social hand grenade" father-in-law (the hilariously hangdog Geoffrey Palmer). Midnight Mass is a shambles thanks to a congregation fresh from the pub. As lay reader Nigel (Miles Jupp) notes: "We're the religious equivalent of a kebab." There's still time for subtle pastiches of Groundhog Day and Da Vinci's Last Supper. A gently witty, fittingly heart-warming conclusion to this second excellent run of the Bafta-winning sitcom.

No one should miss the Christmas Rev, a brilliant end to the series, with ever-embattled Adam (the great Tom Hollander) having to conduct Midnight Mass with a black eye and trying to persuade uptight God pedant Nigel (Miles Jupp) that the season of goodwill is big enough to embrace Jesus and giant Toblerones. Alex's lugubrious father (who else but Geoffrey Palmer?) turns up to add woe and mischief. It takes a stony heart not to cheer at the TV when Adam finally gets the present he deserves. Joyful and (as the song goes) triumphant.

Bananas and crackers feature strongly here, along with nuts and fruitcake, but that's mostly the contributors and their state of mind. Just kidding. The usual suspects line up to have a good old moan about dinner parties and diets, fashion foods and farm shops... you name it, they have a bad word to say about it. Fortunately there's some lovely archive, classic sitcom clips and an enjoyable Geoffrey Palmer narration to punctuate their outpourings. If you ask me, these actors, comedians and media-types are a little too keen to show they're people like us. They love kebabs and prawn cocktail; they don't like polenta or sushi. In fact, not one of them has a pretentious bone in their body. And if their outpourings sound like comedy routines that failed quality control, most of us will agree with their targets. You will undoubtedly smile with recognition at some of this and have a good laugh at clips of Jilly Goolden.

Bumbling. Accident-prone. Racist. Dead. As this documentary shows, dads have usually drawn the short straw in Britcoms from the 1950s on - unlike their sensible wives or drily witty teenage spore. If they're not being the butt of jokes, they're just odious: Geoffrey Palmer in Butterflies, Old Man Steptoe, or Alf Garnett (pleasing symmetry that Warren Mitchell's on-screen son-in-law Tony Booth latterly became a real-life father-in-law-from-Hell for Tony Blair). Features clips from the likes of Only Fools ... , The Royle Family and Gavin & Stacey.

Hey guys! Remember the 80s? They were wicked, right? When we all wore frizzy hair, red braces, ra-ra skirts and everyone had a Sinclair C5? Finger-on-the-pulse BBC2 has bought into the 80s nostalgia boom of, um, the late 1990s and has asked some people to take time off from the after-dinner speaking circuit to declaim about them, while Geoffrey Palmer pretends he cares. We feel obliged to warn you that Shappi Khorsandi is all over this.