Hugh Bonneville

There will come a time soon, after the cost is tallied and the results examined, when the 2012 London Olympics will be no laughing matter. Until then, it's fair game. Writer/director John Morton previously helmed the great People Like Us, and here the tone is similar and the standard just as high.

Set in the Olympics Deliveries Committee, complete with dreadful logo, we meet the excellent cast - Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Coleman, Jessica Hynes, Vincent Franklin - as they prepare to relaunch their website.

A terrific start, mostly stolen by Hynes's spot-on PR agent.

John Morton, writer/director behind People like Us and Broken News, has a potential hit on his hands with this timely, engaging docuspoof. Narrated by David Tennant, it charts the bungling activities of the Olympic Deliverance Commission, a small team led by Ian Fletcher (redoubtable Hugh Bonneville), whose task is to smooth the run-up to 2012. On this week's agenda: nominating national heroes to be torchbearers (so that's, erm, Alan Sugar, Bruce Forsyth, Gok Wan...) and repurposing the tae kwon do stadium after the Games.

Every character in the ODC team shows promise, with Jessica Hynes amusingly maddening as PR bod Siobhan Sharp, whose assertiveness is exceeded only by her ineptitude ("Matthew Pinsent? I don't even know who that is"). She ends up babbling at the Tate Modern launch of her pet project - a hideous, green clock that mystifyingly counts backwards from 2012 to today. Seb and Boris, of course, get frequent name-checks and at least one of them will show up later in the series. It's a runner.

Meet the Twenty Twelve team

Twenty Twelve, a new six-part comic documentary series starring Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes, begins next week on BBC Four.

Hugh Bonneville interview

Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville plays the commission's head Ian Fletcher in the six-part mockumentary Twenty Twelve...

Four episodes in and the tone of Rev has definitely got a little darker. Tonight's episode focuses on the sin of envy, specifically Adam's jealousy at a media-savvy rival, Roland Wise (Hugh Bonneville). Cue an appearance on The One Show that doesn't go as Adam might have wished. That's not to say the jokes have been entirely sacrificed. Simon McBurney's Archdeacon Robert, in particular, is a delight: "The chances of promotion in the Church of England are about the same as in the Chinese Army..."

Rev is such a good-hearted, sweet-natured comedy, it feels churlish to wish that it could, somehow, be better. Tom Hollander is a pocket-sized delight as the well-meaning inner-city vicar Adam Smallbone, but the scripts don't give him enough to work with. As a result, Rev is too mild and lacking in comedy backbone. There are still incidental pleasures though, like Nigel the hand-wringingly earnest curate. Hugh Bonneville is good value, too, as an insufferable media-whore of a vicar who prompts a riled Adam to decide that he should have a media career of his own. He starts by posing for cheesy publicity pictures ("Do I look authoritarian but dashing?") and ends with a disastrous appearance on The One Show.

Thoughtful, inventive comedy by Adam Rosenthal and Viv Ambrose. Newfangle (Russell Tovey) is one of a tribe of humans at an early, pre-verbal stage of development. Picked on by the alpha male (Hugh Bonneville), hopelessly in love, looked down on by his mother (Maureen Lipman) who prefers his brother (Gabriel Vick), Newfangle is a thinker and one day, wishing to express his thoughts out loud, he invents language. Then people start using it for things he didn't intend. Soon prehistory turns out to quite a lot like life anywhere, anytime. But funnier.

Anyone who watched the first two episodes of this three-part comedy may well be hooked by now, not least because it contains the funniest comic performances in years. Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern are perfectly cast as the decent couple struggling to cope in a media world gone mad. Tom Hollander's turn as their friend the agent has a childlike innocence and vulnerability that make him immensely likeable, even as the obscene petulance spews out of his mouth.

Freezing is directed by Simon Curtis, who in real life is married to the American actress Elizabeth McGovern. In Freezing, she plays an American actress called Elizabeth, who is married instead to Matt, a publisher who has recently been let go by the publishing house he works for. And, despite being fictional, Matt, played by Hugh Bonneville, is on speaking terms with various of Elizabeth's celebrity colleagues.

Wood's script is mostly built around career disappointment, with Matt haplessly trying to crank up some alternative career and McGovern falling prey to the lethally short life-span of the female screen career. Her agent, played by Tom Hollander as a caricature of vulgar rapacity, wanted her to fill in a quiet patch with a cameo on Holby City, where she had a chance to play a woman allergic to horsehair. But McGovern was holding out for a part in Vincent Gallo's next movie, a sexual road trip, which triggered a certain anxiety in Matt about the director's notorious commitment to authenticity in performance. At which point, it struck me that Elizabeth McGovern would never get cast in a Vincent Gallo movie, and would probably run a mile if approached. He was only the director in question because he made Chloë Sevigny give him a blow job in The Brown Bunny and Matt's jealousy needed to be tweaked. And when Alan Yentob turned up - doing a bit of 'I'll have my people call your people' schmooze in another popular Notting Hill restaurant - it occurred to me that the target audience for this series consists of around 1,000 people, almost all of whom have a W11 postcode. It might be more cost-effective just to run off some DVDs and bike it round Curtis and Wood's Christmas-card list.