Harry Venning

How come BBC Four gave Georgia Pritchett's hairdressing salon comedy Quick Cuts a mere three episodes only? Whether the reason was timidity or budgetary, the show definitely deserves to be swiftly recommissioned.

Combining a traditional sitcom format with sketch-show sensibilities, Quick Cuts followed the fortunes of salon owner Sue, her family and the disparate group of eccentrics and incompetents in her employ, but with the narrative frequently punctuated by short, sharp hairdresser-client encounters ranging from the truly inane to the deeply intimate.

Some of the sitcom plot lines felt a little forced, and Sue's dodgy boyfriend Trevor seemed to have walked in off a different show altogether, but Pritchett's dialogue was a delight, the cast were terrific and anything starring Doon Mackichan is, by definition, a good thing.

"Secrets in a marriage are like dry rot in a house," opines newly retired lollipop lady Pauline Paradise (Alison Steadman) to an off-screen interviewer. Her husband Ken (Duncan Preston), slumped beside her on the sofa in a near-permanent state of catatonic disengagement, concurs.

As do the rest of the extended Paradise family, their homes visited in turn by this shamelessly contrived but extremely convenient narrative device, which throws into stark relief the shared veneer of domestic contentment with the cauldron of deceit, disappointment and dissatisfaction bubbling beneath.

There is - you guessed it - trouble in the Paradises, and ITV's new comedy drama Love and Marriage will be here over the next six weeks to chronicle it.

There were an awful lot of Paradises to introduce, with an awful lot of back stories to establish, so episode one was rather obliged to sacrifice subtlety on the altar of exposition.

When characters weren't sharing information with the camera they were frequently to be found telling each other things they already knew - "You were a top model in the 1970s" - for the benefit of viewers at home. During the first 20 minutes, the top-rate cast waded heroically through a mud slide of explanatory dialogue, with the threat of submersion beneath a wave of audience impatience never more than a line away.

Shortly after the first ad break, however, they hit dry land. The storylines kicked in, the dialogue came alive - "She keeps saying my name as if she's never heard it before and doesn't like the sound of it" - and proceedings began to gather a satisfying pace.

The Paradise clan, we learnt, are beset by a multitude of problems - financial, emotional, domestic, professional, romantic, historic - which they look to matriarch Pauline to either solve or shoulder.

Following the accidental death of her father, the much-put-upon Pauline reassesses her life and rejects all the roles imposed upon her. To everyone's amazement, including her own, she ups sticks, moves in with her racy younger sister and starts telephoning potential new suitors at two o'clock in the morning.

Despite its remorselessly jaunty soundtrack, Love and Marriage explored some sombre themes and was all the more interesting for it. Steadman's performance drives the drama, but she has excellent support from a stellar cast that also includes Ashley Jensen, Larry Lamb and Celia Imrie.

If not quite hooked, I shall stick with the series, if only to find out why the Paradise family's quiz team didn't get a point for correctly identifying The Constant Gardener as Rachel Weisz's Oscar-winning vehicle.

What a Load of Buzzcocks was a lazy cut-and-paste job, but as lazy cut-and-paste jobs go it was one of the better ones. The show looked back over the past 17 years through the skewed prism of comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, covering changes in pop, fashion and team captain Phill Jupitus' waistline.

Never Mind the Buzzcocks started in 1996, suggesting a chronological approach that would force everybody to wait a whole 11 episodes for the quiz show's most memorable moment, when Ordinary Boys' frontman Preston walked off stroppily, only to be replaced by a member of the studio audience.

Written by and starring Jessica Hynes, Up the Women is a gentle, charming sitcom set in 1910, and follows the transformation of the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle into a branch of the suffragette movement.

Hynes plays the group's timidly radical leader Margaret, fiercely opposed by Rebecca Front's redoubtable matriarch Helen. "What on earth do women need a vote for?" Helen argues. "My husband votes for who I tell him to vote for. What could be a better system than that?"

The script is full of many fine lines, plus one excellent visual gag involving a tapestry of peonies, but it's all rather static, with the action - if action be the word - confined to a solitary village hall location and looking set to stay there.

However, the whole series is a mere three episodes long, so the chances of viewers developing cabin fever are minimal.

The award-winning Horrible Histories has returned for a triumphant fifth series, putting its distinct comic twist upon epochs long gone, plus a few that are, disconcertingly, more recent.

Included among the Slimy Stuarts, Smashing Saxons and Vile Victorians was the Troublesome Twentieth Century, featuring Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 weight-loss programme from 1969 - no willpower was required, but you did need a 36-storey-high space rocket to get you to the Moon, where minimal gravity reduced your weight by 82%.

I'm not sure how I feel about Horrible Histories catching up with my own era - who knows, the next step could involve my featuring in the show's Stupid Deaths slot - but I am definitely a big fan of the show.

Quite apart from being very funny, constantly inventive and subliminally educational, it also has the courage to tackle potentially controversial events head on. Re-imagining Rosa Parks' celebrated civil rights protest as a soul number explained a complex issue in a clever, concise and accessible way without trivialising it.

Rape offers such a rich vein of comic potential that I am bewildered as to why the world of sitcom has overlooked the subject for so long. But not to worry, because Vicious remedies the situation within its first ten minutes with not one, not two, but three rape gags in succession, culminating in the following chucklesome exchange:

Man: Nobody wants to rape you.
Woman: Don't be so cruel.

Mercifully, they didn't move on to discuss child rape, or I swear my sides would have just burst. Presumably the writers are saving this for a later episode - not wishing to use all their best material first time out.

Vicious stars Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour, and I can only surmise that all three have close relatives being held hostage by the production company because I cannot think of any other reason why such luminaries of stage and screen should agree to such dross.

The same applies to highly respected playwright Mark Ravenhill and former Will & Grace writer Gary Janetti, who provided the scripts, presumably encouraged by the regular arrival of loved ones' body parts in the post.

Jacobi and McKellen play an elderly gay couple - one is camp, and the other less so. And that is about as far as the characterisation goes. Their relationship is based upon bickering and making acerbic comments, because that's what gay people do. In episode one, the couple are thrown into a complete tizz because a handsome young man has moved into their block of flats.

The show is so busy trying to be outrageous that it fails to exercise any quality control on the jokes it lets through. "I went to Oxford!" protests Jacobi, when his intellectual credentials are questioned. "For lunch!" replies McKellen. With conviction, it has to be said, because he is a fine actor. But who knows what agonies he must have suffered delivering such a limp line?

The most annoying thing about Vicious - as opposed to being just plain unpleasant, lazy or depressing - is that somewhere in its stagey, studio-bound set-up, populated by stereotypes, is a decent sitcom struggling to get out. Let me know if it happens.

The Job Lot got off to a very strong start.

Sarah Hadland stars as Trish, the manager of a West Midlands job centre, recently returned from stress-related sickness leave. Ostensibly sunny and positive - "turn the unemployed into the fun employed" is her motto - Trish struggles to maintain the facade in a work environment beset by resentment, hostility, despair, defeatism and bureaucracy. And that's before they open up to the public.

The show is essentially an ensemble piece - a uniformly excellent cast includes Russell Tovey, Jo Enright and Emma Rigby - but it is Hadland's understated, poignant portrayal of brittle optimism under unbearable stress that holds it all together. It is good to see Hadland, best known as Miranda Hart's sidekick Stevie in the former's eponymous sitcom, emerging from Hart's shadow as a fine comic actor in her own right.

Comedy duo Watson & Oliver are back with a second series of sketches, despite the somewhat lacklustre reception their first outing received. So all credit to BBC Comedy for keeping faith with the duo, rather than dumping them unceremoniously at the first whiff of underachievement.

I'm not sure what the problem with Watson & Oliver is, unless it's the inability of the great British public to come to terms with a female comedy double act that isn't French & Saunders. They are funny, versatile and eminently likeable performers, working with some very strong and occasionally inspired material.

Some of the sketches don't work at all - the flustered shopkeeper serving foreign students being a case in point - but otherwise the hit rate is very high.

If I have a quibble it is that their sketches sometimes overstay their welcome. Not by very much, but enough to irritate. Watson and Oliver are at their best when they are short, sharp and sometimes shocking.

The Wright Way, a sitcom about a punctilious health and safety officer, should itself carry some sort of health warning. It left me with a raging headache; I left it about halfway through. Critics, like the captain on a sinking ship, should really stay to the very end, but I am a middle-aged man with a sense of his own mortality, and this was 15 minutes I would never get back.

The show is written by Ben Elton so, as you would expect, there are some good lines, neat turns of phrase and a solid narrative structure. However, it is a long way from his best work, with far too great a dependence upon the supposed hilarity inherent in brand names. Horlicks, anyone?

But even if he'd scripted a masterpiece of Blackadder proportions, it would still have been scuppered by the performances, which are uniformly terrible. It is as though the entire cast has come straight from an evening class in sitcom acting for beginners and can't wait to try out their comedy voices. Nobody, but nobody, behaves like a human being.

Worst offender is the show's star David Haig, who has chosen to give his character Gerald a hideous nasal twang all too reminiscent of Chris Barrie's in The Brittas Empire, a sitcom I also found unwatchable. Gerald is a boring person, but the show has fallen into the trap of actually making him dull company for the viewer.

It is often said that a successful sitcom is one populated by characters you want to spend some time with. Gerald, meanwhile, is a character I would like to spend some time with in a locked room, armed with a baseball bat.

The horror of the acting is compounded by a laughter track evidently laid down in a lunatic asylum. Mildly amusing lines are met with an ear-shattering explosion of guffaws, while slightly clever sight gags receive the kind of rapturous ovation that Pavarotti spent a lifetime chasing.

So, to sum up, I didn't like The Wright Way. But had the cast played the characters instead of the comedy, uninterrupted by such a hysterical soundtrack, I suspect it could have been quite watchable. We will never know.

The first in a new series of Playhouse Presents, Hey Diddly Dee was an extremely enjoyable, deliciously dark comedy about a dismal West End production's final day of rehearsals.

Tensions are already running high when obnoxious star Roger Kite (Peter Serafinowicz) denigrates the production in front of the cast, humiliates his understudy (Mathew Horne) and unceremoniously dumps his co-star mistress (Kylie Minogue). But most recklessly of all, Kite threatens the theatre's lucky cat - never a good idea, given the theatre world's preoccupation with superstition and the supernatural.

Writer and director Marc Warren throws in every conceivable showbusiness cliche and mixes them up to fun effect. The story itself gets a little lost, and the ending is confusing to say the least, but the performances from the starry cast are terrific. I particularly enjoyed David Harewood, fresh from being blown up in the series finale of Homeland, as the hapless director trying and failing to keep his volatile star sweet.