Jane Anderson (II)

Comedian Andrew Lawrence is in his early 30s but he sounds like a malevolent child. His comedy is at its strongest when he is spitting venom at those who have wronged him in the past or random groups that have aroused his ire.

The subject for this opening show is the food we eat and a troubling memory of being the fat kid at school - almost impossible to believe if you have seen his rake-like physique - is the first trigger for a rant. From here on he takes no prisoners, with vegetarians, meat-eaters, supermarkets and middle-class food snobs in particular feeling the full force of his rage.

In a very weird way, this reminded me of listening to something that one might expect to spew forth from Frankie Boyle's mouth but that's delivered in Joe Pasquale's voice. Keeping with the food theme, it will have a Marmite effect on listeners.

This deliciously funny series returns with chief curator John Lloyd (producer of Not the Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image and QI), ably assisted by Jimmy Carr. The duo ask guests including Al Murray to donate objects of curiosity, with laugh-out-loud comedic effect guaranteed.

"It is the autumn of 1922, give or take a year or two," rolls out the upper-class, Noël Coward-esque voice of the unnamed narrator of this six-part comedy drama. Cut to Vera Sackcloth-Vest (played with crazed gusto by the fabulous Miriam Margolyes), writer, gardener and transvestite, who is struggling with her staff at Sizzlinghurst Castle. Why do they insist on calling her madam instead of sir? Country life in Kent is so tedious and Vera longs for some excitement. What she needs is to elope with a lover, but first she had better run this past her devoted husband, Henry.

Writer Sue Limb echoes the literary styles of the Bloomsbury Set with pin-point accuracy. Our introduction to Ginny Fox (a brilliantly perceptive, if rather cruel, take on Virginia Woolf, portrayed with obvious relish by Alison Steadman) has the introspective writer staring at a crack in the ceiling for hours and being reminded of her love for Sackcloth-Vest.

How long it will be before these two can escape the drudgeries of normal life (in vast country estates!) and elope with one another is the subject of this opening episode. The writing and acting are both faultless and the series cast includes other great comic names such as Morwenna Banks, Nigel Planer and John Sessions, who crops up as saucy novelist DH Lollipop in future weeks.

This is a real Bohemian rhapsody - and I bet it moves to TV!

At the top of a hill in a Surrey village, opposite Budgens and behind a security fence, lies a top-secret scientific base where a crack team of geniuses dare to think the unthinkable - so long as it is cheap to make. Written by actor Neil Warhurst, creator of the 2009 satire Beyond the Pole, this sharp new sitcom gets a late placing on the schedule because of content and language.

The team of eccentric scientists - all of them socially inept in one way or another - quickly establish themselves as identifiable characters, particularly Anthony Head as the professor in charge of the hapless unit. This is good, and definitely worth trying out.

Neil (Frank Skinner) and Kim (Katherine Parkinson, The IT Crowd) are back and their verbal jousting is more combative than ever. This couple of bookworms have no children to interrupt their thought processes and so have plenty of time to flash their razor-sharp rapiers of verbal brilliance until there's only one man - or woman - left standing.

As ever, the trigger for a tiff can be as harmless as a nursery rhyme: who'd have thought that Jack Sprat's decision to eat no fat made his wife a repressed woman? The spat that starts with the Sprats ends on a bonding note, where both Neil and Kim agree that singing songs while strumming an acoustic guitar results in painful squirming among one's associates and should always be avoided. The intellectual face-offs might still be full-blown, but now there's an inkling of the love and mutual respect that holds this odd couple together.

Never has Prof Brian Cox sounded so off-guard as when Kirsty Young, Jane Garvey and then HM the Queen attempt to go on a date with him. And as for the Archbishop of Canterbury - did he really think asking his followers to send tweets about films connected to fruit and vegetables would be good for his image? The satirical impressions series returns with some brilliant takes on the lives of the famous.

Stand-up comedian Justin Moorhouse has worked as a DJ on a local station and it really shows in this spot-on observational sitcom. It's like Alan Partridge with a sprinkling of self-awareness and the youthful cast are blessed with the presence of Anne Reid as Justin's borderline spiteful nan.

Chris Addison will be pleased with this picture - there is very little bare flesh on show and certainly nothing suggestive of his nether regions. In a terribly British section of his interview by friend and fellow comic thespian Rebecca Front, they discover a shared aversion to nudity, especially their own, in performances.

As Addison remarks, his modesty is based upon his body resembling a stick man made out of Twiglets. Their similarities do not end here, however: both confess to having been goody-two-shoes at school and how many other modern comedians can claim to have been part of madrigal groups? Middle-class and brainy does not have to mean smug, though, and so this interview rubs along nicely. I look forward to Addison asking the questions of Derren Brown next week.

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis embark on a new series of live satire with the Olympics as the butt of the jokes. It could be the athletes, it might be the BBC's coverage or perhaps even G4S's security service that feels the sharp end of their javelin-sharp wit.

The return of the series in which the interviewee becomes the interviewer in the following week's programme opens with the writer, actor and comedian Jeremy Front asking questions of the writer, actor and comedian Rebecca Fron. Fans of the recent and superb Incredible Women series will know that the brother and sister have already proven their comedy worth as a Radio 4 double act, but this takes it to a more intimate level with discussions about their shared memories. Jeremy soon realised that his younger sister was ripe for ribbing and began years of mental torture involving a pixie and Ken Dodd. He's heard all of Rebecca's anecdotes before, but we haven't, so he's kind enough to encourage her to let rip. The Mike Leigh audition story is truly hilarious.