Harry Venning

Regardless of the fact that the TV schedules are already rammed with the damned things, all sharing near-identical formats, television continues to spew out comedy panel shows. Channel 4's Was It Something I Said? is the latest manifestation of a tedious trend.

The basic premise, upon which the contestants are invited to riff, is the world of quotes and quotations. A world very familiar to anyone who has listened to an edition of BBC Radio 4's Quote... Unquote during its 49 series' residency.

But originality clearly isn't high on Was It Something I Said?'s priorities. Take a look at the line-up - David Mitchell in the chair, Richard Ayoade and Micky Flanagan as team captains, and Charlie Higson and Jimmy Carr as guests.

Individually, I like them all. Collectively, as part of a comedy panel show, their terrible familiarity provokes in me a level of screaming boredom that is borderline hysterical.

Even the fine actor David Harewood, roped in as guest 'reader', has been spotted slumming it elsewhere in the BBC's Would I Lie to You?. Presumably, Harewood's ambition was atomised at the end of Homeland's second series, along with his character.

But possibly the most predictable and depressing aspect of the show was its total absence of women. Whether this was the deliberate product of an anti-feminist agenda, or simply down to the fact that Sarah Millican wasn't available, we can only guess.

I really enjoyed The Ginge, the Geordie and the Geek, a rapid-fire sketch show from BBC Scotland that understands the importance of moving on quickly having harvested a laugh. I would place the hit rate around 70% - high for a sketch show - with the other 30% forgiven for no other reason than that the three performers are so likeable.

Jason Byrne has a very endearing quality about him, which is just as well, as his new sitcom Father Figure has precious little else going for it.

Byrne plays a house husband attending to the domestic chores while his wife holds down a job and his two children go to school. He has a friend who pops round occasionally to distract him and tease him with comments about men in pinafores. That is the 'sit' part of the sitcom, and it is not exactly cutting edge.

The 'com' part just baffles me. It consists of a conveyor belt of silly moments and rudimentary sight gags loosely attached to a plot - and I use the term 'plot' in its widest possible sense. In the absence of any decent one-liners or characterisation, Byrne, the writer as well as star, attempts a frustratingly half-hearted surrealism, usually stuck on as fantasy inserts but which sometimes intrudes into the action itself.

To say that I didn't get the humour would be the grossest of understatements. The show seems to hover in a comedy limbo all its own, somewhere between the conformity of My Family and the madness of The Mighty Boosh, the end result being messy and unfocused.

The strange thing is that although I didn't laugh once, I didn't actually dislike Father Figure. As I said, Byrne is an amiable performer and has surrounded himself with an eminently watchable supporting cast, including Pauline McLynn and Peter Serafinowicz. Half an hour passes pleasantly enough, but I won't be rushing back to Father Figure anytime soon.

Is everyone who took part in the First World War dead? Good, let's desecrate their sufferings and sacrifices with a rubbish sitcom.

I was really looking forward to Chickens, Sky1's take on British conscientious objectors during the Great War. It sounded a bold, brave and original concept that promised to push the world of Blackadder Goes Forth to a further level of dark, dangerous, edgy and disturbing satire.

How could it fail to do otherwise, with protagonists who would have permanently existed in the shadow of public contempt, scorn and opprobrium?

How? By draining the situation of all drama and jeopardy, and reducing it to the level of a silly-ass costume comedy, that's how. For a show such as Chickens to work, it has to be grounded in some sort of emotional truth. But this has none. It just staggers from one contrived and supposedly surreal set-up to the next, completely missing the point that the First World War was itself a massive and bloody absurdity.

Chickens is written by its three stars - Simon Bird, Joe Thomas and Jonny Sweet - who therefore have nobody to blame but themselves for the paper-thin characters they're obliged to inhabit. Flat feet, moral repugnance and total imbecility preclude the trio from serving king and country, and consequently they are the only men in a village of women. Imagine a kind of Carry On Conshie, but without the film series' wit.

The show is shot through with anachronisms, not least its jazz-era theme tune, which aspire to be postmodern but actually betray a slovenly unwillingness genuinely to explore the period chosen as its setting.

There is also an awful lot of swearing, which invariably signals a paucity of decent jokes. Have I mentioned that Chickens isn't particularly funny, either?

Big School is unapologetically old school in its comic approach - it is currently BBC Comedy's holy grail to find a popular, mainstream and peak-time sitcom - but I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining and funny it was.

Nobody is ever going to die of laughter while watching Big School, but creating characters an audience wants to spend half an hour with is the bedrock of all sitcoms, and these are well drawn, good fun and beautifully played by an illustrious cast that resolutely resists the temptation to do 'funny acting'.

David Walliams - who shares a writing credit with the self-styled Dawson Brothers, who were presumably leaders of an outlaw gang before turning to comedy - stars as chemistry teacher Mr Church, who harbours unrequited feelings for french teacher Miss Postern, played by Catherine Tate.

Walliams is sweet and funny, but pitches Church at the asexual end of camp, which effectively prevents any romantic chemistry developing between the couple and drives one of the show's major themes up a particularly blind alley.

It is also a shame that the kids at the school hardly get a look-in on the action - an oversight that effectively doomed school-set sitcom Chalk back in the 1990s - as it is common knowledge among teachers that the students are the funniest, silliest and most unpredictable part of any school.

TV review: I Love My Country

What delivers the death blow to I Love My Country is its choice of host. Gabby Logan is a perfectly competent presenter, but she does not do fun or spontaneous, and subsequently spent the entire programme looking like a strict schoolteacher struggling to let her hair down on the last day of term.

That Puppet Game Show, co-produced by Muppet creators The Jim Henson Company, offers genuinely inventive games, lots of funny backstage banter, non-stop madcap energy, two authentic celebrities as contestants - Jonathan Ross and Katherine Jenkins in episode one - and a host of loveable puppet characters, including some singing Scottish sausages. Now that's what I call fun.

The Typhleotris is a freshwater fish that lives in Madagascar's limestone caves, a habitat of such consummate darkness that nature has not bothered to provide it with eyes. But even the Typhleotris, with a bag over its head, sealed inside a box, would have been able to see the jokes coming in Badults.

Not all the jokes, it has to be said. BBC3's new sketch show/sitcom hybrid served up several that were genuinely inspired and laugh-out-loud funny, suggesting the fault lay in lacklustre quality control rather than any shortfall in comic creativity.

But the wheat was bulked out by an awful lot of chaff, not to mention corn, which is very surprising for an inaugural episode out to impress.

Written and performed by Ben Clark, Matthew Crosby and Tom Parry - hitherto best known as award-winning fringe troupe Pappy's - Badults places immature adults into a flatshare environment, inevitably inviting - and suffering - comparison with a host of other comedies, notably The Young Ones, The Big Bang Theory, New Girl and even the works of the Three Stooges.

It has manic energy to spare, an engaging cast, cheerfully throwaway plotlines and an instinctive understanding of how to extract the most from its predominantly studio-bound setting.

The surreal inserts - Darwin comes alive off a £10 note to comment on the action - look a bit tired, and the central characters need far clearer delineation, but Badults shows a lot of promise.

However, poor Emer Kenny will need an awful lot more to work with if she is going to make any impression as fourth flatmate Rachel, sidelined almost as soon as she appeared and looking every bit the arbitrary, add-on female.

Co-written and directed by Christopher Guest, pioneer of the mock-documentary format, Family Tree stars Chris O'Dowd as a man intent on tracing his family history.

The performances are naturalistic, the pace leisurely, the humour gentle, the focus meandering and the format flexible enough to include mock-doc TV interviews - despite it not being set up as a documentary - and for Nina Conti, who plays O'Dowd's sister, to employ her ventriloquist puppet monkey as a co-star.

The show is amiable, entertaining, whimsical and intriguing, but - a terrific blind date scene notwithstanding - it doesn't seem that bothered about being funny.

Count Arthur Strong, the award-winning jewel in BBC Radio 4's comedy crown, has moved to television, prompting much rejoicing and eager anticipation across the social networks. It would seem as though everybody loves the count. Except me, that is.

By some accident at birth or freak of nature I do not possess that part of the brain that finds the sitcom funny. Many are the times I have sat stony-faced in the pub while my mates have literally wiped away tears of laughter, having shared fond memories of the eponymous former variety artist's comic misadventures.

Any and all conversations I have ever had on the subject of Radio 4 comedy inevitably conclude with genius status bestowed upon writer, creator and performer Steve Delaney's bumbling, mumbling and malapropism-prone creation.

Being 'The One Who Doesn't Get It' is a distressing, disconcerting and unenviable position to be in. I can finally sympathise with my late father, whom I remember suffering apoplexies of rage and frustration whenever Monty Python's Flying Circus was on. "What," he would scream to nobody in particular, "is funny about that?".

However, I am pleased and relieved to say that I found quite a lot to enjoy in the count's television incarnation. I thought the set-up was clever, the supporting cast superb, the pace lively and several of the visual gags excellent, particularly the Heimlich manoeuvre that sent an elderly woman's false leg crashing to the floor.

I could even appreciate the skill in Delaney's performance, and identified a whole raft of subtleties I was formerly oblivious to. But I'm afraid the central character of Count Arthur is just too much of a twit for my tastes, provoking all-too familiar feelings of irritation rather than amusement.

But were you to ask anybody else who saw the show, I can almost certainly guarantee that they loved every minute. I'm sorry, Count Arthur, it's not you, it's me...