Gillian Reynolds

Original drama, for which this Friday slot was invented but has lately felt the cruel pinch of budget cuts, returns with an hour-long play by Nigel Smith. It's a bridge between his last series of the same name and the next (which starts next Tuesday at 11.00pm). All of them fall within the description "black comedy" and funny they are while being based on Smith's own experience of being very ill indeed. His book, I Think There's Something Wrong with Me, explains all but the radio dramas have the huge benefit of a superb cast in which Neil Pearson shines.

Mark Evans's magnificent Dickensian pastiche reaches episode four, with Pip Bin (our hero) and his family going through yet more excruciatingly hard times and whole old shopfuls of curiosities. It really is very funny and has the added benefit of a first rate cast. How odd, though, for Radio 4 to schedule Mike Walker's 20-part adaptation of Dickens' own Our Mutual Friend in such close proximity (10.45am - the Woman's Hour Drama - and 7.45pm daily). It, too, has good acting and atmospheric production but if you hear it after Bleak Expectations it just seems hilarious.

We're on the 9.20am from Paddington to Exeter in Mark Maier's new sitcom, an Upstairs Downstairs of rail travel. Robin (Jeremy Swift) is the train manager, trying to keep order while his private life crumbles. There's a flirtatious girl on the refreshment trolley, a self-obsessed buffet attendant, a proper restaurant car with an old-fashioned steward and a frantic female chef. They all fancy each other in a circle of comically doomed expectations. The passengers are daft, dumb and cross. In other words, it's distinctly well observed.

David Quantick riffs gloriously through the first of a new series that, actually, tells you more than you think about jazz (and people who like it) as you variously wrinkle your brow at his presumption or fall into great gales of laughter at the speed of allusion, the acuity of vision. Wittily written, beautifully produced (by Simon Poole, for independents Unique) here are Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, snipped and pasted into a magical musical collage which also happens to be a pretty snazzy essay.

The Penny Dreadfuls Present... Guy Fawkes (Radio 4, Thursday) is the sort of piece only a generation who understands little of war and persecution could produce. David Reed, Humphrey Ker and Thom Tuck, The Penny Dreadfuls themselves, wrote and acted it. They made the past into a comedy with an occasionally serious slant across a generally childlike address to bone crushing, the rack, the gallows and men in black hats with silly beards. The audience at the recording roared with laughter throughout. When you're too young to know about England's religious wars you think nothing about putting a Guy onto the bonfire. When you're old enough to play at being childish, hanging, drawing and quartering is surely no longer a joke.

The Penny Dreadfuls are a writing and performance trio. This play, recorded with an audience, tells the story of the Gunpowder Plot in terms which have everyone giggling right away. We're in the Dog and Duck. "Here we go," says Thomas Percy, "five pints of gin." Ah yes, it's the Horrible Histories style. Actually, it's not as well done as that. As the fireworks explode and the bonfires burn outside, it's hard to take this. Especially if you remember what caused the plot and that Fawkes was hung, drawn and quartered for it.

Third series of Mark Evans's artful Dickens parody in which old Sir Philip (Richard Johnson) recalls his inventive youth and rise to fame when he was young Pip Bin (Tom Allen), struggling against cruel blows of fate supported only by eternal optimism and innate stupidity. It's full of in-jokes, references to other comedies and much merry sport with neologisms and circumlocutions. It also, smartly, simultaneously both conjures and makes fun of a Victorian world of seances, temperance movements and murky crime. Dazzling cast. Slick production.

Hallowe'en isn't until Saturday but here's comedian Reece Shearsmith (from The League of Gentlemen) in a haunted house in Hackney, with a bunch of other entertainers as keen as he is on ghosts, apparitions and macabre manifestations, to discuss the history of horror in entertainment. This week, together with Vic Reeves, Mark Gatiss and Yvette Fielding (often found on satellite TV, being gripped by spooky emanations), they discuss classic scary shows from British radio and TV and their essential ingredients. Next week, films.

Dave Podmore is a fictional former cricketer who scrapes a shameless living in the scrubland between sport and showbiz. There are serious cricket scribes who don't find him funny. I simply adore him. The creation of Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds (who also gave birth to that peerless paradigm of the modern man of letters, Ed Reardon), his adventures mirror life closely enough for laughter, sharply enough to register. Here's how he narrowly missed out to real life former cricketer Phil Tufnell in getting onto Strictly Come Dancing.

"Innovative" and "ground-breaking" may not be adjectives you'd usually attribute to Benny Hill, the risqué comedian. In this documentary, however, Ben Miller, an actor, makes the case for Hill's legacy to be reassessed. Following the success of The Benny Hill Show in 1965, he became the first British comedian to establish his reputation on television, rather than radio. It's no surprise to hear that Hill was obsessed with the craft of visual comedy. More unexpected is that he also played "straight" roles in a number of popular films, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.