Jack Seale

You can't blame BBC3 for constantly repeating its best-ever programme. Here's yet another chance to laugh along with a long-distance relationship conducted in Billericay (his home) and Barry Island (hers), complicated by the young lovers' ditsiness and their weird families and friends. The starry supporting cast (Alison Steadman, Rob Brydon, plus writers Ruth Jones and James Corden) provide the vulgar belly laughs, all as larger-than-life loons who never quite tip over into caricature, thanks to the earthy, affectionate script.

A trio who are feted on the live circuit bring their orchestrated stupidity to TV, spewing out slapstick, songs, arch references and quick gags in a mashed sitcom about a bad local council. It's aggressive nonsense in the vein of Reeves and Mortimer or... I'd say Rik Mayall or The Goodies, but Klang get there first by namechecking both. They also corpse freely, gurn at the lens and feed off the studio audience, trying hard to push that live buzz through the screen. Flying out of this whirlwind are some peachy gags: "Incompetence is at its highest level since records were lost!"

The Aussie music graduate turned comedy cabaret man is a favourite at the Edinburgh festival, thanks to comic songs built on careful wordplay and virtuosic grand piano. There's something uptight about Minchin as a performer that makes him hard to give in to completely, but it lets him straddle the lines between serious and funny, between soul and self-parody. Is he using his gifts just as a platform for gags about canvas shopping bags, terrorism and sex dolls, or does he want you to love him as a proper musician? It's both, and that's fine.

Third-division thespian Nicholas Craig is inexplicably given another hour of airtime to sound off on acting technique, a subject where his lack of expertise could not be plainer. This time, the precious gasbag delivers a footling, downright insulting bulletin on how to portray elderly characters, betraying his trivial outlook by advising on coughing, hobbling, falling ("into a coma or under a bus") and playing grumpy butlers. It's hard to know what's most unbearable about Craig: his vain self-promotion (he plugs his dreadful Charming Walks for Older Actors book), his flagrant name-dropping or his evident bitterness at having been written out of Doctors when his salty sea-dog character went mad.

Sitcoms have a reputation for offering a snapshot of the times - be it Love Thy Neighbour's unhelpful look at 1970s racism, the mild sexual daring of Man about the House, or Only Fools and Horses portraying the 1980s' obsession with entrepreneurship. Using news archive and interviews, this series explores the phenomenon of the sitcom as a cultural barometer. It sounds like a clip show with laughs and substance.

This wordless comedy pilot, yet another in the addition to the "mohicaned Japanese identical-twin mime artists" genre, is perfect for a very late on a Friday night: slouch down and giggle at its nifty sight gags, corny conjuring tricks and clever backwards sequences.

Sharon Horgan's cult comedy ran for two series, but has been denied a third. It seems it doesn't matter how well received Pulling was, BBC3 is now so narrowly focused on its young audience that there's no place for a show about 30-somethings, even if they are slatternly, emotionally retarded drunks.

It's an intermittently hilarious parade of cartoonish characters and crude, often cruel set pieces, with Tanya Franks particularly salty as an alcoholic primary school teacher. Pulling wasn't a classic, but it deserved more time.

A festive episode of a wildly underrated sketch show. Serafinowicz is a versatile actor and a terrifyingly good mimic, but the left-field TV parodies of his 2007 series were perhaps too weird for mass consumption: this is brighter, faster and straighter. There's the odd regrettably unsubtle lampoon (eg Terry Wogan as a hash fiend), but there's also a successful move into traditional sketches, plus joyously imaginative send-ups of Apple adverts and Planet Earth, and fan favourites such as enormous salesman Brian Butterfield, here hawking his comprehensive Christmas pizza. It's a torrent of kooky silliness, textured by Serafinowicz's powerful and slightly scary screen presence. When he's on form - as he often is here - he looks like a star in waiting.

BBC3's smash-hit comedy is finally promoted to BBC1. Ahead of this year's Christmas special, here's a re-run of series two, first shown in March. Having scored a massive success with their first series, writers/stars Ruth Jones and James Corden were under immense pressure to create an even better follow-up. This they did with almost annoying ease: witness this opening episode in which, for ten minutes, almost nothing happens. This is fine because the characters are so warm and so funny, it's a joy to spend time with them. And later, as the family reconvene in an Italian restaurant, there's some beautifully orchestrated hysterical farce as the secret of Nessa's pregnancy slowly leaks.

He's already king of the repeat channels, but now our mate Dave could have a hit original panel game on his hands. The debate format means that there's a nice mix of prepared gags and funny improv, while having John Sergeant present is like resting the whole thing on a lovely velvet cushion.