Hugh Bonneville

This witty, take-no-prisoners satire ends with Hugh Bonneville and his Deliverance team preparing to hand over to the Live team (God help them). But there's still room for last-minute initiatives - Aled Jones being roped into a bell-ringing event called The Big Bong, for example - and disasters. If the Opening Ceremony fireworks end up being virtual rather than actual, you'll know why.

With a certain sporting event looming, it's the last ever episode of this marvellous mockumentary. As the Olympic Deliverance Team prepare to hand over to the Live Team, last-minute panics still need resolving. The fireworks planned by Danny Boyle for the opening ceremony will trigger the Army's ground-to-air missiles. Charging stations for the official Olympic electric cars work so slowly, the entire fleet will soon be stationary. And the special "Big Bong" peal of church bells, supposed to ring nationwide, has so far attracted only two entries. Cue BlackBerry-addicted "branding guru" Siobhan (Jessica Hynes) salvaging the crisis by roping in a celebrity. Will she land Sting or settle for Aled Jones?

Just to add tension, three colleagues have applied for the same post-Games job, with the shortlist about to be announced. Come handover day, Lord Coe isn't around to make his planned speech, having been "called away to argue with animal rights groups about a sheep", so Ian (Hugh Bonneville) steps in. Can he make it a rousing send-off? And will his excruciating but rather moving romantic tension with PA Sally (Olivia Colman) be resolved? Smart, superbly played and painfully close-to-the-bone.

The first episode of the current seasonette of the wonderful Twenty Twelve (BBC Two) was called Catastrophisation and hit the screen just before the story came out about the Olympics security force being short of several thousand people. The people who make the show must be aware that reality is always going to beat them, but still they plug away, creating, with the Head of Deliverance and his team, the funniest ensemble since Dad's Army. Hugh Bonneville plays Ian Fletcher with a dead pan, yet his eyes are full of the awareness that the only sane course is to despair. When one of the team shot him with the starting pistol rigged to fire live ammo I fell at the same angle as he did.

More quick-fire comedy from the incompetent members of the Olympic Deliverance Commission. And with ODC head Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) in hospital after being shot in the foot with a starting pistol, there's evenmore chaos than usual. Not least when it emerges that Lord Coe has poached Fletcher's PA Daniel (Samuel Barnett) with just three weeks to go before the Opening Ceremony. A replacement is quickly found - a welcome return to the series for Olivia Colman as obsessively devoted Sally.

As the Olympics loom in real life, so they do in this short third series about the fictional - but it's a close call - "deliverance" group behind the Games in Twenty Twelve, still the finest comedy this year. This week we're mired in meetings of the "catastrophisation committee". The straight-faced delivery of such too-believable abominations is one of the joys: those offscreen must have their fists in their mouths. Only two things scare me: when the actual Olympics are over, so will this be, which leaves in me the same conflicting emotions as someone desperately wanting to be rid of a massive toothache but knowing they'll miss the fun drugs. And the fact that writer John Morton is becoming - as real and fictional universes curve faster together - ever spookily, supernaturally more prescient.

In the opener to this series there's a desperate attempt to "re-brand" the problems everyone expects with transport. Not to solve the problems, of course, but to call them something else. There are too-late-in-the-day panics about security, when they've had five years to get it right. There is much hustling for post-Games power over both "sustainability" and "legacy", when it's quite clear no one quite gets the difference. In real life it was even worse; just read last week's papers. But Morton and co made this a while ago, and if he is a djinn and a seer, he's also a psychopomp: one of those ancient spirits whose job is to lead us benignly into hell.

Characters get ever better, and we'll miss them. Logistics manager Graham Hitchins somehow grows ever more gauche and unknowing with every episode. As the team argue over special lanes for VIPs, and special special lanes for Americans, he deadpans: "Yeah, but what happens if you want to have some sort of... baby, or heart attack."

Towering over all, technically, has been a masterful Hugh Bonneville as Ian, a very modern doomed English Everyman, surrounded by fools and too polite to say so. But main memories will be of Jessica Hynes as grotesque "head of branding" Siobhan Sharpe; apparently London PR people now regularly quote her imbecilities ("It's not arugula science, guys!"), some of them maybe even ironically. Though I don't know whether they'll stick with this week's "If we get bandwidth on this, you've got maple syrup on your waffle from the get-go: what's not to understand, guys?" A quiet aside from Nick, the refreshing Yorkshireman, dry as a stone dyke: "Well, you, basically." Terrific ensemble, and I'd put up with more of the Games toothache for more of this. Almost.

Comedy is all about timing, and so - with the Olympics a matter of weeks away - here come the final three episodes of John Morton's strangely underloved Twenty Twelve, a chance for the men and women of the Olympic Deliverance Commission to get ahead of the game, or, as head of deliverance Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) deadpans, "ahead of the Games".

It is 8 o'clock on Monday morning at the start of another busy week ("32 Days to Go") and our crack team has been assembled for a breakfast meeting. On the agenda, the post-Games plan for the stadium, security, and public transport. But first there are the pastry options (muffins, croissants, "those Portuguese custard tart things, I'm not sure what they're called ...") and, once that's settled, the endless order for "double-decaf skinny soy macchiatos".

The long-suffering Fletcher sits through it all. Perhaps he knows, as we do, that when the meeting does get under way, the air will be heated with words only because that's what people are supposed to do in meetings. "I should say," offers head of legacy Fi Healey, "that in sustainability terms we've always had the stadium down very clearly as a legacy commitment first rather than a sustainability issue second." Eh?

With its "catastrophisation feedback", "pre-conversationals" and "preliminals" gobbledegook, Twenty Twelve could be accused of being a one-joke wonder. But what a glorious joke it is. And while we've seen this sort of thing many times before (the aloof voiceover, the fly-on-the-wall camerawork, the tumbleweed script), there is something uniquely British about admitting that the people who run things are as incompetent as the likes of you and me. If The Thick of It is a savage Yes, Prime Minister for the age of spin, Twenty Twelve is Dad's Army scripted by Joseph Heller, and I for one will be sad to see it go.

In BBC2's Olympics comedy Twenty Twelve Hugh Bonneville might not get to dress up in fancy costumes or enjoy furtive liaisons with frisky young ladies in maids' outfits. But he looks like he's having much more fun than he ever does on Downton Abbey.

That's probably because his character and the rest of the cast are given some of the sharpest lines I've heard in a British satire since The Thick Of It.

Although the idea that the real London 2012 organising committee hasn't got a clue what they're doing is quite ridiculous. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

The blockheads from the Olympic Deliverance Committee return for three episodes before the Games begin. As usual, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville, who should win every comedy award going) and his quarrelsome minions are wading through a towering mess of inconsequence, PR drivel and pointless bureaucracy.

There are problems with the Olympics travel advice pack, which is too dull and needs a "brand refreshing exercise" so is renamed, with exquisite vacuousness, Way to Go. This is all down to dead-eyed halfwit Siobhan (Jessica Hynes), who seeks to "dial in visual noise".

Then Ian has a disastrous, painfully funny meeting with a nervous and inept police chief, the head of the "catastrophisation unit", who quite obviously has no grasp of her job or the business end of a starting pistol. A joy.

What must the actual Olympics deliverance team think of this brilliant, searing satire, in which each scene is a beautifully crafted showcase of staggering incompetence?

As it returns for three new episodes, Kay (Amelia Bullmore) goes even more off-piste to find future uses for the stadium, while saintly Ian (Hugh Bonneville, super as the straight man) has a meeting with the police 'catastrophisation' unit about starting guns that you just know is going to end in, well, catastrophe.

TV review: Twenty Twelve

Ready, steady, bang - who shot Hugh Bonneville with the starting pistol?