Jack Seale

Radio Times review

Social networks always angrily announce that each new TV comedy is a hateful waste of airtime whose creators' cameras should be confiscated. Eventually, they were right. The justly derided Kookyville (Sunday C4) used the constructed reality format of The Only Way Is Essex - real people having real conversations, but clearly prompted, marshalled and heavily edited by the producers - and found a way to make it twenty times more grubby.

TOWIE, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore and the rest might have plenty of comic moments, but the audience normally like and take an interest in the participants, even if the programme-makers view them as tacky/posh/lairy scum.

Kookyville lost any pretence of following people's lives and presented the most ignorant and uncouth volunteers it could find around the country, carefully showing them in snippets at their worst, for smug laughs. It was presented as a comedy but relied on its stars not thinking they were in one, so the exploitation was obvious and painful.

This goading was depressingly cynical, but what made Kookyville a stinker for the ages was the frequency of ickily insensitive comments about minorities. Isn't it funny when people think it's OK to, for instance, tell an anecdote about a Thalidomide victim falling and not being able to right himself? As we already told Ricky Gervais: actually, no it isn't, and your decision to focus on this stuff is unfortunate at best. From the lazily awful title down, Kookyville felt like it had been designed to make the world just a little bit worse. Culturally, we were another inch towards armageddon.

Radio Times review

A obvious triumph for BBC4's understated cleverness, increasingly celebrated as the superb third series developed, was Getting On, which ended its run on Wednesday. Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine write and act this comedy, set in a women-only geriatric hospital ward. It's a masterclass in letting your creations breathe.

The main characters are all female, something that hardly ever happens on television but is never emphasised. This series acknowledged the accelerating privatisation of the health service, but wove it into Pepperdine's ace portrayal of the antagonist Dr Moore, a brittle snob who uses her sharp elbows to nurse her own reputation and sees patients as stock to be processed - or, in series three, potential subjects for her photographic study of vaginal atrophy in the elderly.

Dr Moore's desire for profitable efficiency is constantly undermined by grubby reality in the form of Den and Kim, the ward sister and nurse who have to dish out the drugs, shuffle the beds and "wipe the bums". Scanlan's Den is a jumble of kindness, daydreams, delusion and loneliness whose pregnancy this year made her even more distracted and vulnerable - but Kim is our eyes and heart, thanks to Brand's selfless performance.

Getting On gives Kim no comic traits apart from weary bluntness and a drab home life, hinted at in phone calls about running out of fish fingers and ketchup. While the funny, absurd stuff was happening to Pepperdine and Scanlan, Brand represented the show's frustrated compassion, buffeted by bureaucratic idiocy and often disobeying orders to do little favours for the patients or avoid another dirty, pointless task.

Kim's attempt to become a doctor was crushed in mundane fashion: she didn't have the time or ability to pass the relevant course. The last episode had emotional pay-offs for Dr Moore and Den, earnt through careful but unobtrusive series-long plotting, that gave the characters new depth. Kim just bumbled off home as usual but, BBC4 budgets willing, she'll be back to win more tiny victories against depressing odds.

Radio Times review

The first episode of Last Tango in Halifax (Tuesdays BBC1) was perfect, such that I don't think I want to watch another one - or if I do, I'll pretend it's a different programme and this was a precious one-off. Anne Reid and Derek Jacobi were two Yorkshire pensioners, both widowed, who had been separated by chance as teenagers but still lived not too far apart. Pushed onto Facebook by the grandkids, they found each other, met in person, and slowly revealed that each had pined for the other for 50 years or more.

Reid and Jacobi unfurled the fantasy I-love-you-too romance in Sally Wainwright's sparky script until the last scene, when their families burst into the café with their subplots about ex-husbands and tricky children and lesbian affairs and mysterious pasts. There's five more episodes of that stuff, but anything that isn't those two impeccable actors glowing at each other across a teapot will be a cold second-best.

Dara O'Briain interview

"Look at me. There's no way I'm bringing a sexiness to science"

The most blisteringly original sketch show on television - the BBC seems to think it's too rich for English blood - returns for a third series. Brian Limond, the star, writer and director, goes to places other sketch shows would shy away from even if they knew they were there. Can his unsympathetic showbiz psychic, Raymond Day, top the series two sketch where he told a grieving father he'd switched off his son's life support a day too early?

What out-of-character monologues will Limond deliver to make you laugh and nag your psyche in equal measure for days afterwards? Gird yourself and find out. Limond is a one-off.

Nope, they still haven't done a weak episode. This week, insane MI5 chief the Examiner (Robert Lindsay) has made an unbroadcastable recruitment video, so Tim and Caitlin step in. But they can't act until they assume ludicrous, sexed-up B-movie personas.

The role-playing reignites the spark between them and takes Tim out of his normal, footling self. He sticks with the stubble, blond wig and leather jacket even after filming. He's a new man, and Darren Boyd is a new variety of hilarious.

Meanwhile, Marcus is on a father-and-son TV quiz. Naturally, he's got a ringer in to replace his embarrassing dad, but the laws of sitcom say the two storylines must meet.

Expect some pearl-clutching tabloid outrage about this. Bernadette Davis's comedy introduces a quartet of girls in their mid-teens who swear, have sex and regularly countermand their mothers and fathers! Yet while parents of girls approaching that age may well blanch, there's some depth to lead character Viva (Adelayo Adedayo), who's rebelling against her dad (Colin Salmon) because he's seeing her school football coach (Dolly Wells).

The script mixes deft set pieces with cheap laughs - the mute girl in a burqa made me uncomfortable - but the direction, by Adam Miller, is consistently great: plenty of swift visual gags and a very funny, lairy girls' football match filmed in slow motion.

Spy has invested in a top-notch ensemble, but the star is still Bafta-winner Darren Boyd as rubbish spy Tim. All Boyd's strengths are in evidence this week: rising irritation as Tim tries to give a talk at his son Marcus's school; pratfalling as he tries to conceal that he's taken Marcus with him to the office, which isn't really feasible at MI5; and a glimmer of lovable warmth and vulnerability as the fiasco brings father and child closer.

Meanwhile, suddenly putting a character on drugs might normally be an unacceptable short cut, but when it's Robert Lindsay, trouserless and rattling with amphetamines, it's more than forgivable. He keeps thinking he's seen a demonic boy in the corridor, which of course he has.

Most episodes of this early 1970s sitcom by Jim Eldridge had been wiped and lost for good until a listener sent in some home recordings. Fans of Dad's Army or the Carry On films will want to tune in: Arthur Lowe plays the station master at a hopeless backwater railway stop where the trains always run late, with Ian Lavender as his son!

Kenneth Connor and Liz Fraser also star. It's Lowe's show, as he reprises his signature comic persona of a pompous bumbler authoring his own embarrassment, with a fair bit of help from his unreliable underlings.

When a comedian chats with someone in the front row of the audience, it's often the funniest part of the show. The performer spontaneously proving their smarts is a thrill.

Now imagine a panel game where comics grill punters who sit in designated seats and have been chosen because their lives or personalities are funny. Sounds great in theory, but you can't regiment banter. Even with Frank Skinner on the panel and Jack Dee hosting, every joke here is forced - until it emerges that one of the stooges used to be a porn actor, after which it's groansome easy wins all the way.