Jack Seale

Tricky times for the Pontyberry menfolk. The university ball is fast approaching for Sunil (Rory Girvan), which means he'll have to fend off his vampish fellow student Leah once and for all, and remember his wife and child at home.

Alan (Steve Speirs) has to think about his next move, with his job as a lollipop man coming to an end after "three years, man and boy" and his snotty ex-wife strutting around with gifts for Little Alan. Worst of all is the predicament that Dai (Owen Teale) finds himself in.

He's jobless and, in a strand that forms part of one of the funniest episodes Stella has yet produced, still unable to perform in the bedroom. Auntie Brenda (Di Botcher) comes to the rescue with some blue pills she picked up in Spain: "They'll turn a button mushroom into a stick of celery before you can say Heston Blumenthal."

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Radio Times review

E4's big drama of the week, My Mad Fat Diary (Mondays) was about the agony of a teen whose struggle to be normal has made her sanity bend and break. Sharon Rooney was Rae Earl, whose real diary has been dramatised and moved from the 80s to 1996. The benefits of this weren't obvious: it made 32 the ideal viewer age, which is a bit old for E4, you'd think, and it wasn't a very careful period piece. Rae lusted after Archie, a hot geek whose spectacles, hair, speech ("Style it out!") and ironic pop covers on choppy acoustic guitar were all completely 2012.

Rae emerged from psychiatric hospital and tried to make friends, with the twin stigmas of her medical history and her size representing the teenage shame of not being able to hide that you're a freak. The "mad" and the "fat" were treated differently: Rae's shape got her into harmless, cartoon embarrassments, like getting stuck halfway down a slide at a pool party, which were immediately forgiven by her suspiciously compassionate new mates. She was better at fitting in than some teens ever are. She got invited to a pool party!

Much more acute were the scenes in the hospital between Rae and her tiny tomboy friend Tix (Sophie Wright). When Rae lost her nerve and broke back into the ward, Tix was tenderly furious that she would think of giving in. That this reaction came from a deep affection, forged by having admitted their terrors to each other, was vividly conveyed by Rooney and Wright and a lot more affecting than the drunken scrapes and lagered Britpop soundtrack in the outside world. We need to get Tix out of there.

Brilliantly holding this Frank-Spencer-In-The-Bell-Jar mash together, though, was future star Sharon Rooney, totally convincing as a teen, as a soul determined to avoid self-destruction, and as the sort of wildly libidinous beast young females rarely are on TV. Rae was the hunter and Archie was the prey: "I'd shag him," said Rae in one of the many salty inner monologues Rooney delivered with extra relish, "till there was nothing left except a pair of glasses and a damp patch." My Mad Fat Diary would be better telly if all the best stuff wasn't going on inside Rae's head, but Rooney created a vibe in which you forgave that and wanted her to win.

That's the trouble with having so many good characters in your multi-stranded ensemble comedy drama: what if part of the show ends up being worthy of its own series? Ruth Jones and her writers will be in that predicament if they keep coming up with such good scenes for Elizabeth Berrington as Paula, the randy, boozy undertaker who this week has to face the fact that her randy, dopey husband Dai is hopeless at the job. At the very least she needs to get someone else to apply make-up to the corpses.

Everything else seems monochrome in comparison, as Luke returns home and Alun's luck worsens still further when his attempt to raise money by flogging old tat ends up making a massive loss.

But there's a lovely subplot in which 13-year-old Ben tries to learn about the ladies, and a surprise in store.

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Ruth Jones's series about the chaotic life of a divorcee in the Welsh valleys has always had a bit of steel beneath its joyful family dynamics and cosily eccentric characters. On the evidence of the opening episode of series two, there'll be more drama this year in the aftermath of the first run's cliffhanger: Stella (Jones) might not live happily ever after with her new man Sean, since the baby she's expecting might not be his, and her rekindled old flame, Rob, is inconveniently still around.

We're setting up the new storylines tonight but, in between, there are the usual bursts of bawdy comic relief, from Stella's heroically rude aunt, back from Tenerife and insulting everyone in Pontyberry, to dipsomaniac undertaker Paula (Elizabeth Berrington). Her husband Dai is more involved in the business now, but needs a lot of training. "Well, of course, they have to be dead first! It won't work otherwise, will it?"

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Jason Manford corrals a slew of stand-up comedians into taking a wry, sideways look at the past 12 months. Recorded in front of a live studio audience a couple of weeks ago, Manford and his fellow comics draw on the best, the worst and the weirdest things that happened in 2012. Much of the material comes from the showpiece events that supposedly brought the whole country together: the Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics and the Paralympics.

If the air of positivity around those galas means they don't turn out to be the fertile comic ground the comics would hope for, there's good mileage in this year's nonstop rain, and in such unforeseen cultural phenomena as Gangnam Style by Korean internet star Psy.