Harry Venning

As all right thinking people agree, Cheers is the greatest ensemble TV sitcom of all time. There have been several attempts to relocate its success in a British pub, the latest of which is Inn Mates, a pilot by John Warburton who is the first writer to have gone through the BBC's College of Comedy and got a script on screen.

Whilst it falls way short of its illustrious American predecessor, Inn Mates is amiable and entertaining fun set in a red-brick modern monstrosity optimistically called The Friendship Inn.

It revolves around the disparate groups of characters that frequent or serve in it. These include two twentysomething couples with contrasting lifestyles, their sexually abandoned alcoholic single friend, the ruthless landlady and her wheelchair-using DJ, two dozy and doting community support police officers, and a gay man whose donated sperm has come back to haunt him in the form of a teenage biological son desperate to form a bond.

The various strands don't really hang together, and Inn Mates feels slightly like several sitcoms sharing the same half hour. Of these the father/son scenario is by far the strongest, and could even go it alone as a spin-off.

It offers pathos, charm, wit, conflict and originality. Plus on-screen chemistry between Neil Morrissey, playing against type, and Joe Tracini, who is so good that I can almost forgive him for Coming Of Age.

Odd One In is a new game show with a disarmingly simple premise: spot the authentic person in a line-up of frauds. A format arrived at by the disarmingly simple process of pinching the most popular segment from Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

Edition one saw host Bradley Walsh invite two celebrity teams to identify the real nun, glider pilot, rollerskater, man married to pineapple and, in a cunning reverse, fake beard.

The celebrities, who included Peter Andre and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen, were allowed to interrogate the contestants before making their decision but that didn't seem to help much.

And I have to say, the show works. Walsh is in his element, the banter is amusing and the categories suitably eclectic and imaginative. Plus, viewers can play it at home without exercising more than 25% of their brains, which is what you want on a Saturday evening.

Hallelujah, and praise The Lord, for a decent sitcom. I would even go so far as saying that should Rev find the audience it deserves - which is never a given - it would have the makings of a classic.

Not since Channel 4's brilliant, if shamefully underrated, Book Group has an opening episode so impressed me. James Wood's script was an object lesson in how to set up a series with the minimum of plot contrivance, clunky exposition or stereotypical characters. Moreover, it positively exuded confidence, intelligence and wit: never surrendering to the temptation of the cheap gag, but allowing its humour to build gradually and seductively. The laughs, when they came, were worth waiting for.

The excellent Tom Hollander takes the title role of the Reverend Adam Smallbone - OK, maybe the one cheap gag - newly arrived from the delights of rural Suffolk to minister to a socially and economically deprived inner-city parish. Dibley it ain't.

Episode one saw his minute congregation suddenly swollen by middle-class parents attracted by the whiff of a good Ofsted report for the local church school. With a hole in the stained glass window to repair, Smallbone's conscience is sorely tested by this new and potentially lucrative source of income.

Rev is by turns gentle and charming, acerbic and satiric. Its allotted span of one score and ten minutes flew by far too quickly, and I can't remember the last time I thought that about a new sitcom.

If I have one minor criticism, it is Smallbone's internal monologue with God. At first this struck me as just a little bit twee, but then I figured that an element of spirituality is tolerable in a comedy about a vicar, so as long as God doesn't answer back, I'm prepared to forgive it. Amen.

I was not that impressed by Reunited - Mike Bullen's pilot for a potential comedy drama series about former housemates meeting at a reunion eight years on. Rather than resurrecting dormant friendships, the emotional scars re-open, jealousies resurface and old flames are quickly fanned.

Although Reunited was well constructed and amusingly written, I can't say the pilot left me clamouring for more. The characters just weren't sufficiently appealing. My tolerance for self-satisfied, middle-class thirtysomethings is never strong at the best of times, but this lot struck me as particularly unpleasant - not to mention unbelievable. Even Ed Byrne failed to convince as a charmer, and Ed Byrne is nothing if not charming. I was also deeply offended at the criminal waste of casting Jemima Rooper in a thankless and insipid girlfriend role.

Puppets, it would seem, can get away with pretty much anything. Under normal circumstances all comic references to Anne Frank are subject to a blanket prohibition, but Mongrels extracted guilty laughs by suggesting that it was an overzealous game of Yahtzee, not Dutch collaborators, that gave away her whereabouts to the Nazis.

Mongrels features a menagerie of endearing fluffy animals, with occasional support from a passing live actor, the star of which is a sensitive, confrontation-phobic, urbane urban fox called Nelson. Other characters include a snooty Afghan Hound bitch, a kleptomaniac pigeon, a latino cat and several rats. Episode one opened with a houseful of cats dining on the rotting corpse of their elderly owner, moved swiftly on to embrace the twin themes of defecation and castration, paused briefly for a musical number extolling the virtues of prejudice, before climaxing in a Saw style torture scene involving the use of microwave ovens.

Somewhere in the frantic mix sweet natured Nelson found time to embark upon a doomed romance with a chicken, prompting several oddly touching moments, before the show, and the fox, reverted to their true 'red in tooth and claw' natures.

Mongrels sets out to be offensive, but does so with an irresistible combination of wit, imagination and gleeful enthusiasm. I laughed out loud several times, I sniggered childishly throughout and on at least one occasion I felt sick, which counts as a ringing endorsement.

To borrow a gruesome Americanism, the show features the "vocal talents" of Lucy Montgomery, Dan Tetsell, Rufus Jones and Katy Brand, all of whom sounded as though they were having more fun than is decent.

At some point in the recent past, James Corden decided to combine being a fine actor with an alternative career as TV's new King of Blokes. James Corden's World Cup Live is one of the consequences.

Borrowing flagrantly from the formats of countless shows before it - Sky's Soccer AM, TGI Friday and Baddiel and Skinner being the most obvious - James Corden's World Cup Live is a blend of comedy, chat and banter performed before a braying studio audience that has been as ruthlessly drilled as the Arsenal offside trap under George Graham. (Soccer-phobic readers: rest assured that this is my last torturous football analogy.)

"A good point!" pronounced James Corden on England's one-all draw in their opening World Cup match against the USA. Either Corden hadn't watched the same toothless, largely clueless, and hilariously calamitous performance I'd endured, or he had a live party to host in its aftermath and wasn't going to let dour reality intrude on the festivities.

In an eclectic choice of guests for the opening show, the sofa was shared by Simon Cowell, who needs no introduction, and Katy Perry, who soon will, should Russell Brand dump her as his fiancee.

Had England beaten the USA I'm sure Katy's combination of kookiness and volume would have charmed the watching nation, but as things stood, her presence was overwhelmingly irritating and pointless.

She was, however, preferable to the intolerably smug Cowell, there to plug his World Cup single. "I'm going to get it played in the England dressing room at half time" he boasted. As if the team didn't have enough to worry about.

But the show sinks or swims on the abilities of its star. Quick-witted and affable, Corden performed heroics in keeping up the show's momentum through its modest 20-minute duration. James Corden's World Cup Live could yet prove good fun, it just needs to loosen up and relax into its run - a bit like the England football team, in fact.

I can understand the appeal of shows such as Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women because the sight of elderly curmudgeons railing against a world they no longer understand is innately amusing. But what is the point of The Grumpy Guide to the Eighties? The eighties have gone, never to trouble anyone again. It's like complaining about the Jurassic era.

The reason, of course is that programmes like this are cheap to make and can be cobbled together with the minimum of fuss, particularly if you are lazy and go after easy targets - mullet hairstyles? Check. Rubik's Cubes? Check. Bucks Fizz? Check.

Quite apart from the inherent idiocy of mocking past fashions - as I remember, we couldn't get out of the seventies quick enough - or lambasting pop music for being shallow, the contributors to this Grumpy Guide struck me as particularly obnoxious.

While Fiona Allen waxed lyrical from her kitchen, a hideous study in Dayglo spew leered over her shoulder from the wall behind, automatically disqualifying her as an arbiter of taste in any decade. Sadly, I can't identify the charmless American oaf with a goatee beard who shared reminiscences upon mugging local yuppies, otherwise you would know to avoid him. And as for Terry Christian slagging off the eighties, isn't that like Hitler denouncing the Third Reich.

I'm not sure what to make of La La Land. I am a big fan of its star, Marc Wootton, but I find the whole prank TV genre tedious in the extreme.

Wootton plays three characters, an aspiring actor, a showbiz psychic and a documentary film-maker, who come to Los Angeles hoping to realise their dreams of fame and fortune and, in the psychic's case, to escape a charge of the attempted murder of a child.

Once Stateside, they provoke the locals with their rude, ignorant, intolerant and boorish behaviour. You know, like Sacha Baron Cohen was doing with Borat several years ago.

Because the targets are Americans it presumably makes them fair game, but far from humiliating his unsuspecting co-stars Wootton merely serves to highlight their patience, tolerance and forbearance.

Some, like former movie star Ruta Lee, give back as good as they get. "You don't know shit," she helpfully informs oafish cab driver Gary, who has been encouraged to pursue a showbusiness career by his mates down the pub.

La La Land is fitfully amusing, and the three characters are beautifully observed, but I can't help thinking Wootton's talents can be put to better use.

I quite like Life of Riley, Georgia Pritchett's returning sitcom about an extremely extended suburban family. There are some good jokes, well structured plotlines and solid performances all round. But for series three could the kids wear name tags, possibly colour co-ordinated according to family affiliation, because I still haven't worked out which is which.

The Gemma Factor is a new sitcom about an aspiring actress/model/presenter whose irrepressible optimism remains undiminished despite the combined drawbacks of her having no discernible talents whatsoever, living in a small Yorkshire village where the nearest bright lights are Halifax, and signing with an agent who has a criminal conviction for sex trafficking.

Given its showbusiness theme, The Gemma Factor automatically loses points for its total absence of any verbal or visual references to The Stage newspaper. Hopefully this appalling omission will be rectified in future episodes.

Apart from that, The Gemma Factor was great - funny, fresh and charming. The last of these attributes is almost impossible to pull off, so congratulations to all involved.

What makes The Gemma Factor's achievements all the more remarkable is how perilously close it skates to the potentially appalling. If the show's comedy calibrations were just a few degrees out Gemma's personality would be irritating and imbecilic rather than sweet and naive, with her friends and family coming over as clumsy cliches, not cuddly and colourful. As it is I was totally seduced, even without the picture postcard shots of West Yorkshire at its sunniest and greenest.

Some of the gags do strain to be funny, and the simpleton policeman is a caricature too many, but otherwise Tony Pitts' script is spot-on. And in Anna Gilthorpe the show has found an authentic star to play the delusional wannabe of the title.