James Smith (I)

Simon Amstell's dysfunctional family sitcom, Grandma's House, returns for another run of gently serrated farce, in which the lapsed tormentor of pop buffoons plays an undisguised version of himself struggling to escape from his abrasive public image.

Last time he was trying to achieve something more meaningful with his life and craft - in reality, of course, he made Grandma's House - and as we reconvene he's finally been given a self-penned TV pilot. Which sounds a lot like Grandma's House. His proudly forthright Jewish mother - played by the great Rebecca Front - is naturally delighted, especially since Simon's career slump means he now lives in grandma's box room. "I can feel the shame lifting, can you?" she beams.

Like a more populous variation on Roger and Val Have Just Got In, each episode unfolds entirely within the titular abode, with the intensely self-aware Simon a perpetually mortified victim of his family's eccentricity. As before it's all very likeable, witty and controlled and Amstell has thankfully improved as an actor following a painfully self-conscious start during the first series. Indeed, they've developed his shortcomings into a running gag within the show itself - episode one is titled "The day Simon officially became a very good and totally employable actor."

The death of actor Geoffrey Hutchings, who played Simon's granddad in the first series, is deftly handled (you won't find overbearing schmaltz in this show), with his absence quietly underpinning an otherwise typically chucklesome episode in which our discomfited protagonist deals with the fall-out from a one night stand and fails to mend a possibly symbolic leak.

If I have a criticism it's that Samantha Spiro as Simon's embittered aunt is still too broad at times, although James Smith - coincidentally Front's co-star in The Thick Of It - continues to judge his performance perfectly as mum's hopeless ex-fiancée. Also, apropos motherly concern, a brief topless scene reveals that Amstell has the body of an emaciated alien. Eat, man, eat!

Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is back in a blizzard of vituperation as Gold repeats series three of Armando Iannucci's peerless political satire. Tucker is doling out his "verbal colonics" to a new Secretary of State (splendid Rebecca Front, in a role that won her a Bafta). The inventive expletives bounce off the walls in firework displays of pure filth and bad taste. The dexterousness of the insults remains a marvel, as does the sublime supporting cast - Chris Addison and James Smith - of useless apparatchiks.

Radio Times review

The most unfairly criticised comedy of the year, with sages queuing up to make the shattering observation that Simon Amstell can't act. Why would he need to? He was playing himself in a sitcom about a comedian who, despite considerable success, is paralysed by neuroses and has no communication skills, especially when stuck with his brash, unstarry relatives. Mumbling and nearly corpsing worked for Jerry Seinfeld and were what was required here.

Amstell's merciless dissection of his own personality gave Grandma's House its real-com edge, but more importantly, it had a fabulous cast (Rebecca Front, Samantha Spiro, James Smith) enjoying a script full of spiky but affectionate family ding-dongs, in a Royles/Gavin & Stacey vein. When the later episodes introduced classic sitcom plotting - intricate, chaotic, accelerating - Grandma's House got even better.

It's the last episode of Simon Amstell's carefully crafted sitcom in which he stars as himself. The series has seen some superb performances from its sparkly cast, most notably Rebecca Front as Amstell's onscreen mother Tanya. Tonight, Tanya and Clive's (James Smith) plans to get married are disrupted when Grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) becomes ill.

It was a curate's egg of a half-hour, not that a curate and his egg offer the best metaphor for a show about a loving but bickering family of east London Jews. In fact, it is a singularly ill-fitting metaphor, the expression "curate's egg" originating in the old Punch cartoon about a curate who was too timid to complain about a bad egg he had been served. There would be no such timidity at any table of Jews worth their salt beef. Even a visiting rabbi would spit out such an egg.

Enough eggs already. Grandma's House revolves around the simple idea, one that dates back almost to the birth of television comedy, of different generations of the same family arguing in a front room. Steptoe and Son did it to great effect, so did Til Death Us Do Part, so did The Royle Family. In some ways, Grandma's House is The Royle Family with chopped liver. In other ways, it is Seinfeld removed to Gants Hill. And the nod to Seinfeld is evident in the character of Simon (Simon Amstell), the presenter of a TV comedy panel show about music, which - just as Jerry Seinfeld played a stand-up comedian called Jerry, a mildly fictionalised version of himself - is precisely what Amstell, the co-writer of Grandma's House with Dan Swimer and erstwhile presenter of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, is in real life. Or was. Indeed, in last night's opening episode Simon announced to his family his intention to quit his TV show, much to their dismay. "In my kalooki group that's all we talk about," lamented his grandma (Linda Bassett).

The other obvious parallel with Seinfeld is that Jerry Seinfeld made it through nine seasons of that phenomenally successful show rarely ever being more than engagingly wooden as an actor. Good acting was the preserve of his brilliant co-stars and so it is here. Amstell barely seems to try to act, just issues his lines semi-mechanically wearing a half-smile, just as Jerry did.

Still, it didn't matter in Seinfeld and, strangely, it doesn't matter here either. Amstell, aided by the sensible decision not to run a laughter-track, somehow makes a virtue of his self-consciousness, and in any case, there are enough pitch-perfect performances, notably from Rebecca Front playing Simon's divorced mother, Tanya, and Samantha Spiro as his aunt, Liz. It helps that the writing, too, is often pitch-perfect. Tanya is being courted by Clive (James Smith), whom Simon loathes, but who is considered highly eligible largely on account of a 42-inch plasma TV on which "you can see every hair of Noel Edmonds's beard". And when Simon's grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) breaks the news that he has cancer (an unwittingly poignant detail, given that Hutchings died suddenly last month), it is questioned on the basis that "years ago he found a lump on his testicle and it was a raisin in his pants".

Just as a wandering raisin can be mistaken for a testicular lump, so can a promising first episode be mistaken for a good new sitcom, and I wouldn't like to commit myself too soon. Besides, there are reasons why London-Jewish humour is far less familiar to us than the kind of New York-Jewish humour exemplified by Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Larry David (whose Curb Your Enthusiasm also has loud echoes in Grandma's House). It is no accident that the Jewish humour British audiences know best and love most has historically been imported, mordant and razor-sharp, from the United States. Nor is it any accident that Jewish characters in British sitcoms are, for the most part, pretty forgettable. It is more than 40 years since Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, and not even the warm glow of nostalgia does it any favours.

Simon Amstell's decision to quit as host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks was just about worthy of a few column inches within the showbiz pages of The Sun and the Daily Mirror, but its own sitcom? Apparently so... The opening scene of the sarky comedian's first stab at situation comedy sees him being berated by his family for ditching his lucrative line in insulting pop stars. It seems upsetting Preston from The Ordinary Boys pays the mortgage.

It has to be said that acting isn't exactly Simon's strong point, since he struggles to portray even a convincing version of Simon Amstell. While a fine cast including seasoned humourists like Rebecca Front (The Thick of It) as Simon's mum and Linda Bassett (East is East) as his Grandma put in fantastically accomplished performances, to say that the former Popworld host looked a little out of sorts is something of an understatement.

With all of this self-referencing and ham-fisted stabs at acting, I was expecting to loathe Grandma's House, but it's actually rather good, with some decent gags and - apart from Mr Amstell - a genuinely brilliant cast. Other topics covered in the series opener included the facial hair issues of Auntie Liz (Samantha Spiro) - easily resolved with a roll of Sellotape, it seems; Grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) suspecting he has "cancer" (he's peeing a lot); and best of all, mum Tanya's buffoon of a new boyfriend Clive, a barnstorming performance from The Thick of It's James Smith.

All in all the Grandma's House opener offered up more than enough laughs to merit tuning in next week, but one wonders whether it might not be improved with someone else in the lead role. Next time, Simon, cast someone else as yourself.

There are some great lines in this new comedy, even if the main character is wrapped up in such a thick cocoon of self-referential irony that it is impossible to tell whether he is meant to be endearing, or an obnoxious twit, or both.

The award-winning Simon Amstell, who co-wrote the script as well as playing the lead, is pretty much himself: an acerbic TV presenter in search of something more meaningful, such as love, or Buddhism, or a new haircut. This causes shrieks of outrage among the female relations who gather in his grandparents' ornament-cluttered suburban semi with nothing more exciting to do than watch him being rude to pop stars on television (as the real Amstell used to do on Never Mind the Buzzcocks). Simon can be both knowingly funny, and amusingly clueless: when his grandfather says he has cancer, Simon gabbles "What should I do? Should I hug you?" and "That was my concerned voice. Did you like it?"

This ambiguity makes him difficult to warm to as a comic creation, and he may need to become more coherent to make the six-part series really sing. In the meantime, there are typically well-pitched performances from The Thick of It's Rebecca Front, who plays Simon's dotty mother, Tanya, and James Smith, who takes on the role of her odious suitor Clive - complete with smarmy anecdotes and an inexcusably high waistband.

When Simon Amstell stepped down as host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, it was a black day for the noble art of taking the mickey out of pop stars - and guests. What, we all wondered, would he do next?

This is it - a sitcom in which Simon plays a character named Simon who is about to break the news to his family that he has decided to give up his TV job of taking the mickey out of pop stars.

Except nobody says mickey, of course: they're allowed to use much, much stronger language on BBC2 than I ever could in a family newspaper.

If this format sounds like it's in serious danger of disappearing up its own backside, don't forget that two of the greatest sitcoms ever made, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, also featured Jewish comedians - Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David - playing versions of themselves. And it didn't exactly do them any harm.

Rebecca Front plays his mum, Linda Bassett his grandma and Geoffrey Hutchings is his grandad. And the fly in the ointment of this happy family is mum's new boyfriend Clive (James Smith) - an easy target for Amstell's barbed humour.

How closely this set-up mirror's Simon's own family is something we can only guess at as we admire his grandma's comfortable living room which is all G Plan furniture and ironic splashes of kitsch.

It's not as caustic as Buzzcocks but it's a grower.

More satirical spin doctoring and creative swearing as Armando Iannucci's political sitcom continues to prowl the corridors of power. It's party conference season, meaning that new Secretary of State Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front, a superb addition to the cast this series) is stuck in an Eastbourne hotel room, writing her speech. No matter how many mini-kettlefuls of coffee they make, however, she and her right-hand oaf Ollie (Chris Addison) can't quite nail it. Until, that is, her hapless adviser Glenn (James Smith) wheels in his secret weapon: a tragic local widow.

Think Yes Minister on speed - and that includes the cameraman. But lurching around with hand-held cameras is all part of the modern mockumentary, a reminder that this is on-the-fly comedy rather than a contrived sitcom. The result here is brilliant, if you can live with a slight headache.

Jim Hacker lives in the form of hapless Minister for Social Affairs Hugh Abbot (Chris Langham) but with more sweary bits. And while Sir Humphrey Appleby was all oily charm, Abbot's advisers (James Smith and Chris Addison) are more bumbling and insecure.

But nowhere in Yes Minister was there anyone like splenetic chief political adviser Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), clearly modelled on Tony Blair's spinmeister, Alastair Campbell.