Harry Venning

I have tried to like Full English, I really have. I love animated comedy - The Simpsons and South Park are two of my all-time favourite TV shows - and appreciate all the time, effort and expertise that goes into making them. But three episodes into Full English's run and I think I've seen enough.

The show is set in the south of England suburban home of Edgar and Wendy Johnson - voiced by Richard Ayoade and Rosie Cavaliero - and their three teenage children. Ostensibly your quintessentially dull, middle-class family, their lives are touched by the bizarre, surreal and frequently sexual.

Full English does have its funny moments, particularly the throwaway visual gags, but the script largely comprises sledgehammer satire, sniggering scatology and obvious pops at pop culture. All of which aren't bad in themselves if they were tempered by a little charm, but the show has none.

True, the priapic grandfather is accompanied everywhere by a giant green invisible friend, but this device feels like it has been bolted onto the show to inject quirkiness, rather than coming naturally out of the set-up.

To deliver one more kick to Full English's CGI groin, I find the show visually disappointing. The animation is flat and uninteresting, while the characters' faces are ugly and unappealing. I blame the way they've drawn the eyes.

There's nothing too shocking about Last Tango in Halifax, a rather sweet and gentle love story in six parts about two elderly singletons who rekindle their romance from 60 years earlier.

Episode one features an incident of juvenile crime and a car chase, but that is about as racy as things get. Instead, the production wisely concentrates on its two leads, Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid, as they quietly go about their business of acting everyone else off the screen. Nicola Walker and Sarah Lancashire, as the couple's respective grown-up daughters, are provided with substantial subplots of their own, but it will be the incomparable Jacobi and Reid that will draw and hold the audience.

Some Girls is basically a teen girls' take on The Inbetweeners, complete with profanity, banter, sex, swearing, violence and football. The setting, however, is no salubrious suburb but an inner city estate, lending a little more edge, as well as a more varied culturally mix, to proceedings.

The comedy is frequently broad and sometimes blunt, but the relationship between the quartet of friends is well observed and firmly rooted in recognisable, realistic emotions. I wasn't particularly taken by the show's use of voice-over narration, but I was extremely impressed by the narrator - Adelayo Adedayo, as Viva, is a real find. Colin Salmon, who recently waltzed off Strictly Come Dancing, plays Viva's firefighter dad.

To borrow a phrase from their theme tune, hooray for Harry and Paul. Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse have been bounced around the schedules and now occupy a late-night Sunday slot, helping to take the edge off the end of the weekend.

As well as the return of the yobs with a dog, who terrorise innocent bystanders, and spiteful traffic warden Parking Pataweyo, new characters include a minor royal couple, who in episode one enjoy a walkabout in Willesden.

The show also manages to smuggle in the C-word, which must be a first for a mainstream BBC comedy.

The jury is out on Hebburn, the new sitcom set in the eponymous Tyne and Wear town. The set-up sees recently graduated Jack (Chris Ramsey) returning home to introduce his middle-class, Jewish bride to his unreconstructed, working-class Geordie family.

There are some good lines and the cast is excellent, but Hebburn just seems to be trying too hard, abandoning slow build of character for the more impactful, but far less interesting, 'loveable low life northerners behaving badly' school of comedy.

ITV2's new comedy drama Switch follows the romantic and magical misadventures of Stella, Jude, Grace and Hannah - four twentysomething, flat sharing female witches in super-trendy Camden Lock, north London.

This self-styled Camden coven shrieks, hugs, banters and occasionally casts spells to help each other out, such as bringing an accidentally microwaved cat back to life, erasing the inconvenient short-term memory of an unpleasant employer or simply placing romantic enchantments on young men they like the look of.

All the coven needs is a makeshift cauldron, a suitable spell, objects representing the four elements, and each other. "We don't have anything for air," exclaims one of the girls at an impromptu - and extremely hurried - spell cast.

At which point I have to confess to the uncharitable thought that they could always try sticking their heads into the mixture.

Switch is okay, but it could have been so much more fun if it had featured four diverse and interesting leads, rather than the bland, boring, antiseptic and homogenous refugees from a tampon advert offered up here. The cast is fine, but the script is so thin on characterisation that hardly a single personality can be scraped together between the four of them.

They even share the same body shape, as though any deviation from the supposedly acceptable, attractive norm would send the potential young male audience fleeing in disgust and horror at the deviance of it all. Most disappointing, none of the leads is written to be remotely funny. The most the programme allows them to be is frothy or scatty, which is frankly irritating.

As if to prove the point, Caroline Quentin was introduced halfway through episode one as the overbearing, overprotective mother of youngest witch Grace. The involvement of a character with a bit more flesh, figuratively and literally, lifted the show immediately. The trailer for episode two also promised some added unpleasantness in the form of a rival coven from Kensington - all sneers and snotty attitude - who would appear to offer the interesting edge our Camden quartet is sadly lacking. So Switch might yet be worth persevering with.

Me and Mrs Jones opens with a goldfish in a toilet bowl. I can only guess that the goldfish took one look at the script and attempted to escape before his television career suffered irreparable damage.

Of the many unkind epithets suggested by Roget's Thesaurus, 'excruciating' is the one that best describes this show. Until I watched it, I did not realise it was physically possible to grit one's teeth, curl one's toes and clench one's sphincter all at the same time. And stay that way for half an hour.

Purportedly a romantic comedy, it is about as light and fluffy as a breeze block. Not the most sparkling of analogies, I grant you, but better than anything the lazy and witless script of Me and Mrs Jones had to offer.

"Houdini would have trouble getting out of this dress," grumbles our scatty, sexy heroine Gemma, as she writhes around in a store changing room. Houdini? The escapologist who died 88 years ago? Watch out for further thrillingly contemporary references to the general strike, Irish home rule, speakeasies and the disappearance of Amy Johnson.

Where the show strives to charm, it succeeds in irritating. I am a fan of Sarah Alexander, who plays Gemma, but here I found her wackiness so mannered as to be unbearable.

But the worst thing about Me and Mrs Jones is that no part of it rings true - not the characters, not the relationships and definitely not the dialogue. Romantic comedy needs to appear effortless, but every minute of this contrived, constipated monstrosity screams with the strain of it all.

A solidly dependable cast, including Nathaniel Parker and sitcom stalwart Neil Morrissey, tries so desperately hard to unearth humour from the barren comic landscape that I actually began to pity them. This is particularly true of Jonathan Bailey, lumbered with the Herculean and ultimately futile task of lending sympathy to Alfie, Mrs Jones' unremittingly loathsome eldest son, just back from his gap year abroad. Apart from a big mouth, an overinflated ego and a penchant for harassing women on public transport, Alfie also has a best mate in tow, who just might hit it off with his mum over the next five episodes.

Three episodes into the series, and Cuckoo is settling down nicely. The premise is exploited to the full, the scripts are consistently amusing, and the performances of Greg Davies, as the bumptious, blustering dad, and Andy Samberg, as the pseudo-spiritualist slacker son-in-law, complement each other perfectly. Plus, any show featuring Helen Baxendale is a good thing by definition.

Best Possible Taste - The Kenny Everett Story opens with a pair of false teeth in a glass of water gurgling a variation on the standard biopic warning: "It's based on a true story, but some of the scenes have been 'scrungled'. It also contains... naughty bits."

Dropped into Kenny's weird and wonderful world, we are immediately reacquainted with several of its celebrated inhabitants, including Cupid Stunt, Sid Snot, Brother Lee Love, Angry of Mayfair and Marcel Wave. They are on hand to help recount the life and career of the consistently self-destructive, frequently self-loathing and sometimes self-centred radio and TV maverick.

Oliver Lansley perfectly captures Everett and his multiple incarnations. Katherine Kelly plays his wife, Lee, and Simon Callow puts in a suitably luvvie turn as Dickie Attenborough, who rescues the much-sacked Cuddly Ken from the broadcasting wilderness of producing jingles for a carpet warehouse.

Such is the dearth of new programming during the Olympics that I am obliged to review Mad Mad World, a show well into its run which I had rather hoped to avoid ever setting eyes on.

My low expectations were met in full. Mad Mad World is yet another comedy panel show in an already saturated market that is more than happy to rehash other formats rather than attempt anything microscopically different. They even steal the funny buzzer noises as pioneered by QI.

The basic premise creaks with unoriginality and old age - aren't foreigners and their television shows funny? Clive James certainly thought so, three decades ago. Clips are exhumed, many already viral on the internet, and two teams make purportedly witty comments about them. Several of the rounds feature still photographs from news stories, which rather defeats the object of the exercise and suggests that any attempt at quality control was long since abandoned back in the pub where the idea was originally hatched.

Paddy McGuinness is the perfectly competent host, and the panellists make a decent fist of trying to make the show look unscripted. A sliver of spontaneity did infiltrate proceedings courtesy of guest Stacey Solomon, who was endearingly ditzy throughout, but even she could do little to lift the suffocating miasma of complacency engulfing the whole sorry enterprise.
"What is unique about this Venus de Milo?" asks McGuinness of a peculiar looking statue.

"Is it made of shit?" replies team captain Rufus Hound.

It was. But it certainly wasn't the only thing that evening.