Jack Seale

Accidental spy Tim (Darren Boyd), still hoping to rekindle office romance with Caitlin (Rebekah Staton), has the perfect assignment fall in his lap: shielding an at-risk, incredibly hot witness (Anna Skellern) in his home. Making his colleague jealous by pretending would be enough, but Elaine proves willing and, indeed, insatiable.

She's also dangerously barking, culminating in a confidently over-the-top scene in a restaurant that could be cringeworthy if the cast weren't so good. It climaxes with a line that caused major corpsing on set. You'll know it when they get there.

Tim's best mate, ex-wife and boss all observe his new relationship, in an episode that makes good use of that visual gag where you don't initially know certain characters are present in a scene. Chief lurker is monstrously irresponsible therapist Owen, played with manic relish by Miles Jupp, the latest addition to a fearsomely good ensemble.

Series six of the comedy sports quiz that wasn't on air during the Olympics, but became a nice footnote in the Team GB story. When Mo Farah triumphed, people asked how he came up with his "Mobot" celebration. The answer was that he'd had it created for him: when he'd appeared on A League of Their Own, fellow guest Clare Balding had invented it and host James Corden had named it. Farah is back on the show tonight alongside gymnast Louis Smith and team captains Andrew Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp.

Radio Times review

If you sat down in front of BBC2's new sitcom Hebburn (Thursdays) wanting to be annoyed by another portrayal of common people as naïve oddballs, it didn't completely let you down. Fresh Meat star Kimberley Nixon was Sarah, the new wife of Jack (Chris Ramsey), who'd left the north-east to become a journalist but was now back to introduce his bride. His family cheerily struggled to cope with Sarah being posh, Jewish (Jack's mum threw their bacon in the bin and turned baps into bagels with an apple corer) and southern (her parents live in York).

Basically it was an extended version of the scene in The Royle Family where Anthony brings home Emma the vegetarian, and Nanna asks, "Can she have wafer-thin ham?" But what the Hebburn lot also share with the Royles is feeling warm and real. Jason Cook's script was particularly thoughtful when drawing Jack's parents, and was backed by a double casting coup: the faultless Gina McKee in a rare comic role as the hysterically proud mum, and Jim Moir/Vic Reeves, as good here as he was in Eric & Ernie as a dad who took five minutes to emerge from the kitchen when the son he adores came home. He looked happiest when Jack cracked a bad joke that could have been one of his.

Cook hasn't smashed any paradigms - Hebburn's first episode built predictably, if skilfully, to a standard sitcom finale - but he's writing about his own home town, with love. The people and relationships weren't common, but universal.

Series two of the unerringly funny comedy about an idiot mistakenly hired by MI5. Darren Boyd won a Bafta for the lead role of bumbling Tim in the first series - but during the course of the run, an embarrassment of other good characters emerged.

So while Tim's ongoing efforts to snare his gorgeous colleague Caitlin (Rebekah Staton) and avoid being corrupted by his insane boss (Robert Lindsay) are still funny, they are subplots here.

Instead we focus on Tim's young son Marcus, played by the superb Jude Wright. Usually the most terrifyingly assured male on TV, Marcus now finds his opponent in the election for school president is a sharper, slicker version of himself. An über-Marcus.

Series 26, episode one: team captains Noel Fielding and Phill Jupitus are back in their chairs for more rude pop-based quizzing. In the presenter's seat - still without a regular occupant since the peerless Simon Amstell resigned - is Kathy Burke. Her excellent comedy Walking and Talking showed she knows and loves her pop music, at least if it was released in 1979. Among the guests are Fazer from N-Dubz and surprise Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford.

Another very promising pilot, although whether something so quirky could stretch to a series is debatable. The meat of it is a live show by The Boy with Tape on His Face: an anonymous performer, his mouth gaffer-taped, who puts costumes on audience members and makes them play stupid games with a sweet visual gag at the end. They're very silly jokes that are somehow made funnier by spending ages building up to them.

In between are sketches that continue the flippant tone, and miniature scenes playing on the creepiness of the Boy's staring eyes. It's wilfully a curio.

The big hits were loaded into episode one last week. Now this political prank show is more about quick raids on corporate foyers, and the unending delight of people with strong opinions who keep giving them long after they should have realised that their interlocutor is bogus.

In fairness, some don't know they're being filmed and, in the case of noted intellectual Jonathan Miller, his rant when he's doorstepped on election day by an openly corrupt Tory is rather magnificent. The members of anti-monarchist protest group Republic fare less well - and two hugely profitable utility companies haven't a hope.

This is a queer beast. Nighty Night creator Julia Davis scripts the tale of a woman who, in 1851, washes up at a glum coastal village. She marries a widower parson, incurring the wrath of his demonic housekeeper (Davis), who prefers the first, dead, wife.

There's heavy investment in an impeccable cast and setting, but I'm not sure what Hunderby is. Davis's reputation is for visiting icky places nobody else will brave; this is mainly innuendo and goofing, with gaps between gags as the linear story chugs on.

John Hannah and Suranne Jones take an affectionate hatchet to their previous work playing detectives in Rebus and Scott & Bailey, in a deadpan spoof of overblown serial-killer mysteries.

It's very much in the style of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and is more frivolous and fun than you might expect from its creator, Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror, Dead Set).

Cloth fires a silly joke at the screen every second and, while a lot of them don't stick - sometimes it's too laborious in ticking off either cop-show clichés or jokes those American films did better - when it's funny, it's deliriously so.

A spoof entertainment news show, using lookalikes to create CCTV, hidden-camera and cameraphone footage of celebrities behaving embarrassingly. This is unmistakably the work of Alison Jackson, who won a Bafta for BBC2's Double Take. Like her previous work, it takes simple, underwhelming comic ideas, such as Prince William buying anniversary flowers at a petrol station, and adds nothing at all to them, leaving opportunities to raise a laugh or make a point untouched.