Jack Seale

A bit of a break from Stella's troubles this week, as we focus more on her best friend, dipso/nympho undertaker Paula (the always brilliant Elizabeth Berrington). Her struggling business gets a lift when it's entrusted with the funeral of a local rugby legend: a touchline conversion gave the old boy the nickname "Dick the Kick". As all of Pontyberry rallies round to help Paula, an increasingly outrageous parade of celeb guests arrive to play themselves, and to join in with a slew of "Dick" puns. You'll never guess who's doing the eulogy.

Ruth Jones has taken time over her first solo project - because she's subtly shifted genre. Stella has a friendly, multi-generational array of eccentrics, like the Welsh half of Gavin & Stacey, but it's definitely comedy drama: warm, undemanding, based on story and character more than gags.

Jones is Stella, a knackered divorcee with three kids, no money and no lover. You feel you know her within minutes. There's the odd superfluous line of exposition as we meet Stella's friends and family, because Jones is anxious that you get to know them, too. But when you do, you'll want to spend more Friday nights with them.

New Year's Eve is a tricky one for TV: lots of us stay in through necessity, bloating or an aversion to contrived parties, yet nobody's ever really cracked the question of what we want to watch.

The big channels stick with Big-Ben-and-fireworks jobs. Channel 4 doesn't try to compete at midnight, firing its big light-entertainment gun earlier (9pm) with Alan Carr's New Year Specstacular. Jonathan Ross, Kirstie Allsopp, and Heston Blumenthal are among the likeable Carr's comic foils, with music from JLS and the Ting Tings.

Programmes that pull together a bunch of festival turns are often ragged and random - not this one. As your compere Arthur Smith explains at the top of the show, all the acts have at least a modicum of BBC4 sensibility about them. Alex Horne and his, um, Horne Section offer silly but dazzling musical comedy, while Tim Key does something similarly clever and stupid with his poems. David O'Doherty has a Bontempi organ and a unique way with words, while Nina Conti offers an ingenious and brilliantly improvised variation on her familiar ventriloquist routine.

The Black Mirror scribe looks back in disgust at a year in the worlds of news, TV and, as a special bonus for BBC4 viewers, video games. Brooker's eternal concern that most of his fellow broadcasters are hysterical, reductive prudes won't be short of grist, as he considers coverage of the August riots, the economic apocalypse and Pippa Middleton's regal glutes. Contributing are furious comic Doug Stanhope and conceptual documentarist Adam Curtis.

A best-of compilation proving that this has been yet another strong series. Your hosts include Tinie Tempah, who was confident enough not to try to be funny all the time, but was funny when he did try; and James Blunt, who was even more confident in that he did try to be funny all the time, and was. At one point Blunt had Phill Jupitus doubled over laughing at a naughty joke about the Pussycat Dolls. We can only hope Blunt devotes more and more of his time to comedy.

Meanwhile, the myths surrounding Alice Cooper's rock antics gave the show's gag-writers one of their best nights, and earlier this month Cilla Black made a surprise appearance.

While we wait for series two of sitcom Grandma's House (it's in the can for next year), this 2010 stand-up set shows Simon Amstell playing an equally funny exaggeration of his tortured self, on stage in Dublin.

Having read too many philosophy and self-help books during nights spent home alone, he over-analyses every moment of his life, ruining his attempts to find love. Every word and gesture of the resulting routine is placed with cruel accuracy, turning Amstell's self-hatred into intelligent, cathartic comedy.

Jones's cosy, retro talk show works well at Christmas. Not all seasonal programmes are festive, and not all chat shows are actually chatty, but this is both.

Bounding onto the colourful set are comedian Micky Flanagan and Lulu, no doubt full of gossip from her neck-cricking stint dancing with Brendan Cole[ on Strictly. But the best banter is sure to come from James Corden, Jones's friend and Gavin & Stacey collaborator. Since the end of their sitcom, he's had a baby and a big stage hit with One Man, Two Guvnors; she's created Stella, a G&S-ish comedy drama coming to Sky1 in the New Year. Plenty to talk about, then, and they're always good value together.

The music's not bad, either: following the release of their singles collection National Treasures, Manic Street Preachers are in the studio.

The 16th best programme of 2011 according to the Radio Times.

A dementedly energetic, militantly unpredictable script by Tony Roche created one of the comedies of the year from a shabby and much-documented episode: how the Pythons were ambushed by religious finger-waggers upon the release of Life of Brian in 1979. Holy Flying Circus sought not to describe the Pythons, but to emulate them, using dream sequences within dream sequences, hokey rolling text, smashed fourth walls and, at one point, a lightsabre duel between puppets. As references and in-jokes twanged back and forth, Holy Flying Circus was funny on its own merits as well as a fanboy joy, not stuck in aspic but bright and sharp - a thing to cherish on the same shelf as those Python box sets.

Radio Times review

The 36th best TV show of 2011 according to the Radio Times.

A superb example of BBC4's curious but rewarding obsession with mid-ranking, mid-20th Century entertainers, and the misery success brought them. Hattie Jacques, trapped by sexist typecasting and her supportive but inert husband John Le Mesurier, welcomes a sexy young lodger (Aidan Turner) into the family home and proceeds to have an affair with him. As Jacques, Ruth Jones captured the desperation of someone who knows, deep down, that she's destroying herself, but can't quite stop. Robert Bathurst was just as fine as Le Mesurier, who could see what Jacques was doing but couldn't quite rouse himself to prevent her. A sensational-on-paper story became sober, classy and sad.