Geoffrey Whitehead

This week, Reggie (Martin Clunes) is having trouble with small talk. Of course, Reggie is struggling with bigger and worse things, but it's the small talk where it breaks out. Whether chatting by the water-cooler or having a glass of wine with his mother, he can't hit the right note, and those vivid fantasy moments he has don't help. He also continues to pine for Jasmine (Lucy Liemann), the gorgeous woman at work. Liemann has practically nothing to do, but does it well. Likewise, Fay Ripley seems wasted as Reggie's wife and tonight Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig add to the roster of comic talent worthy of more and better material. Better is the occupational health "wellness woman" whose response to any ailment is a perky "Oh that's horrid! Oh you sad sausage!" But it's a brave move for the script to mock poor-quality TV - luckily it's in one of the better lines, as Reggie notes, "Quite tiring the telly, isn't it? At one point I seemed to be watching CSI: Bournemouth."

Reactions to this remake have been pretty mixed and if things don't pick up in week two, the BBC could find that it's the viewers who are doing a disappearing act.

Tonight finds Martin Clunes's Reggie having trouble with office small talk and a visit to his company's sympathetic Wellness Person is called for. There are also unwanted visits from his mother and father-in-law to contend with - and Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig, in particular, have both been pulled from the BBC's bottomless pit of stupidly posh-voiced thesps.

Like the show's ill-judged laughter track (the weaker the gag, the bigger the laugh), these cardboard cut-out characters are harder to believe in than Reggie's flights of fantasy - although Clunes continues to do a heroic job conveying Reggie's disconnection with the rest of the human race.

Martin Clunes is a first-rate comedy actor, but also a very courageous one if he's willing to tackle a character created by comic genius Leonard Rossiter. Yet although Clunes lacks Rossiter's manic edge, nobody does grumpy curmudgeon better and there are other differences in the series that augur well, not least that Perrin creator David Nobbs has co-written this series with Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, who understands Clunes' talent well.

Characters like Wendy Craig's Marion, Reggie's disapproving mum, are refreshingly new and there's promise in the casting of Fay Ripley as Perrin's wife and Geoffrey Whitehead as her father.

Last August a six-part comedy series began on Radio 4 that captivated most of those who heard it - and the people who didn't like it were just plain wrong. Written by Mark Evans, Bleak Expectations was a wonderful pastiche of Dickens - the two novels cannibalised for the programme title for a start - as well as other Victorian costume dramas, spiced with surrealistic devices such as underwater squirrels and a raft made up of trained tuna. Evans worked on the admirable principle of throwing so many jokes at the listener that even if they missed, some most would get through and, at times, listening to it was exhausting.

And now it's back. One doesn't want to spoil the tension by detailing any aspect of the plot but those who feared that we had seen the last of Gently Benevolent because Anthony Head, who played him, had more glamorous parts to play on TV need fear no longer. Richard Johnson again plays the elderly Sir Philip Bin, and Tom Allen his younger, accident and grief-prone self, while Geoffrey Whitehead plays all six members of the sinister Sternbeater family.

Chapter Three, incidentally, even has a guest star - David Mitchell. When the greats of modern comedy queue up to take part in your show in any capacity, however small, you know you're up there with The Muppets and Extras.

Come 2005, it will be 30 years since the versatile poet and comedian got her first break on Opportunity Knocks! but more recently the only TV appearance which readily comes to mind was a brief, suitably witty ditty on receiving her MBE. All the more reason then that her fans will welcome the new four-part Radio 4 sketch show Ayres on the Air, each episode tackling a subject no doubt dear to sixtysomethings' hearts. The first deals with the humiliations that come with inevitable physical deterioration and though, for example, her ode to the Wonderbra hardly creates a storm in a D-cup - many jokes are signposted way ahead - there is an endearing cosiness to the material, its delivery and pace. Both Geoffrey Whitehead and Felicity Montagu are also solid stooges off which to bounce her style of comedy.

To the Discworld for Mort (11pm, Radio 4), a four-part adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel. An unemployable lad is taken on as the Grim Reaper's apprentice and soon finds that ushering souls into the next world is not all it's cracked up to be. Carl Prekopp plays our boy Mort, Geoffrey Whitehead is Death and Anton Lesser narrates.