Jack Seale

Shows like this have the tricky task not just of being good, but of befriending us. We must think of the Starling family as friends we'd like to spend Sunday night with.

Episode two of Matt King and Steve Edge's humble saga cements that feeling, laying on familiar comedy-drama trappings - a tasteful folk-pop soundtrack, some slightly hammered-home plots, the odd scene where people just sit about being nice to each other - but colouring them with sharp comic set pieces and foibles that give the characters depth. Everyone here is a bit lost in life, but has hope in the form of their loved ones' support - a simple truth that warms the heart.

A bit more Fry & Laurie, please...

Stephen Fry says he and Hugh Laurie are working together again. For F & L superfan Jack Seale, that's enormous news...

You can't help being trepidatious about this new impressions show. It's focused on the trashier end of celebrity, it stars Morgana Robinson and Terry Mynott, who received mixed reviews for The Morgana Show, and the fact that it's a new impressions show is worrying in itself.

Much of Very Important People is indeed cheap and derivative, leaning heavily on gaps filled with swearing and, in the case of doing Brian Cox as a preening fop, jokes that were dead and gone 12 months ago. But I must admit that Robinson's takes on Frankie Boyle, Danny Dyer and Natalie Cassidy had me spluttering merrily.

Series two goes up a gear when the superb Vincent Franklin arrives as Barry, husband of ratty aunt Liz (Samantha Spiro). Barry has mucus and a morbid obsession with rolling news, but he also has a flat in London that Simon Amstell (Simon Amstell) wants to borrow.

Barry fits right in as another source of tension that can't quite be smothered by domestic ritual. His pomposity is a good counterpoint to Clive (James Smith), who's getting more vulnerable, stuck in the loft fixing a leak. Clive emerges at the end for a tremendous comic pay-off.

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The stand-up comic and celebrity rationalist probably gets as close here as TV can to making maths fun. Fellow egghead Professor Marcus du Sautoy sets O'Briain a series of puzzles couched in accessible, practical terms, but which get progressively harder and need real sums to answer.

Maths graduate O'Briain squeaks out attempted solutions, often rather impressively, on a Waking the Dead-style glass board. Joining him is the obligatory weekly comedian guest - David O'Doherty tonight - cast in the role you're probably playing at home: shouting answers that might, if you're lucky, be half-right.

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The comic says his new show School of Hard Sums celebrates "the language of reason and rationality".

Ricky Gervais follows up Life's Too Short with a show about a simple, vulnerable man working in an old people's home. Brave, but this isn't the moment where Gervais is consumed by political incorrectness once and for all: Derek is nearly a brilliant reinvention.

You'd have to try hard to read Gervais's portrayal of slow, sweet Derek as mockery, and the sad ending is up there with David Brent's "Don't make me redundant" meltdown. Kerry Godliman shines in a supporting role as Hannah, the care worker who is Derek's best friend and is thwarted, selfless, burningly sad but endlessly compassionate - every moment she is on screen is sigh-inducing magic.

But Derek falters because Gervais, who writes and directs without Stephen Merchant, is too reliant on tropes from his previous work. The action is shot as a documentary about the characters, a device that doesn't add much and highlights the occasional, inappropriate similarity between Derek and Gervais's other creations. Casting Karl Pilkington as another of Derek's colleagues also breaks the spell, and sometimes the mix of slapstick and sensitive drama is uncomfortable.

Mark Gatiss: I'm proud of binned Sherlock pilot

Co-creator says he and Steven Moffat were "very happy" with 60-minute original, in a BBC Four interview tonight.

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The upcoming C4 comedy about a man with learning difficulties isn't the bad-taste train crash you might expect.