Jason Manford

Your average comedian can earn serious money these days. Your very good one can earn a fortune. Michael McIntyre's latest tour, for example, netted him £21m. But there's more than one way for a stand-up to rake in the cash.

As we'll see in BBC2's new documentary series Funny Business, corporate gigs and telly commercials are huge earners. You want Jason Manford? That'll be 25 grand.

With contributions from the likes of Jo Brand, John Cleese and Rhod Gilbert, the programme also poses the inevitable awkward question. Namely, is a comic selling their soul by doing this stuff? Some people clearly think so. Carmarthen's Rhod Gilbert points out that the only ad he's ever been willing to do is for Visit Wales.

Mind you, I personally reckon he sells it better, sloganwise, in a clip from Live At The Apollo: "Wales is all right! It's not s**t anymore! We've done it up!"

Funny Business, BBC Two, review

Michael McIntyre: £40,000. Ricky Gervais: £25,000. Jason Manford: £25,000. Jo Brand: £10,000-£25,000. Barry Cryer - who after that lot looks an absolute steal - is £2,000-£5,000. This, according to Funny Business, is what it costs to hire the above to tell some jokes at a corporate event.

Half an hour in the company of John Bishop would be reason enough to tune in, but he's plundered his address book and persuaded his celebrity pals to dust off their favourite one-liners.

Robbie Williams, John Prescott, Ricky Hatton, Freddie Flintoff and Warwick Davis all do their best to make us giggle, along with fellow stand-ups Jason Manford, Jason Byrne, Andi Osho and Mick Miller.

Members of the public are also given the chance to exercise their funny bone, including an impish schoolboy with a joke about poo (naturally) and a side-splitting laugh. As you'd expect from that line-up, it's a mixed bag but squeaky clean, so there's no need to cover young ears.

John Prescott shifts his buttocks around in an armchair. 'So the doctor asks me: "What do you mean you want a flu jab in your left arm AND your right arm?". "Well, why do you think they call me 'two jabs'?".' Such is the quality of gags in this joke-based half-hour presented by John Bishop.

This 'show that always makes you laugh' goes for the funny bone by combining snippets of stand-up from the likes of Jason Manford and Ed Byrne with pre-recorded Christmas cracker-worthy contributions from D-lebrities and members of the public. The stand-up is far and away the highlight in comparison to the cast of Chingford health instructors, Wiltshire factory workers and Heather from EastEnders reeling off funnies that range from the bizarre to the hackneyed.

Entertaining enough, but could probably have done without the to-camera spots from a curiously vacant Bishop.

John Bishop's new vehicle is a resolutely family-friendly throwback to the days of The Comedians, when TV standup was a relentless stream of "fella-walked-into-a-bar" jokes that steadfastly avoided any reference to life as actually lived. A cast of thousands are involved, including celebrities from Ricky Hatton and Robbie Williams to ordinary folk, telling creaky jokes that at least crease them up. All this is peppered with occasional pellets of non-abrasive observational humour from smirk-merchants such as Jason Manford.

John Bishop's new series serves scant purpose other than for the comedian to act as compere for a series of clips of fellow stand-ups (among them Jason Manford, Jason Byrne and Mick Miller), celebrities (including Jamie Redknapp, Ricky Hatton, John Prescott and Freddie Flintoff) and members of the public, telling jokes. The series runs to 10 episodes and is entirely dependent on the quality of jokes, which on tonight's evidence aren't very good. They are, however, squeaky clean, so at least it's an option for entertaining family viewing.

Jason Manford corrals a slew of stand-up comedians into taking a wry, sideways look at the past 12 months. Recorded in front of a live studio audience a couple of weeks ago, Manford and his fellow comics draw on the best, the worst and the weirdest things that happened in 2012. Much of the material comes from the showpiece events that supposedly brought the whole country together: the Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics and the Paralympics.

If the air of positivity around those galas means they don't turn out to be the fertile comic ground the comics would hope for, there's good mileage in this year's nonstop rain, and in such unforeseen cultural phenomena as Gangnam Style by Korean internet star Psy.

Sharon Horgan's effort was the pick of Sky1's latest lot of Little Crackers but honourable mentions must go to Paul O'Grady and Jason Manford.

It was great to see O'Grady back as Lily Savage, while Manford was very brave basing his tale on his own teenage circumcision.

He even got to dress up as a big-breasted blonde nurse. So maybe all that business on Skype was for research after all.

Tonight's first frolic down celebrity lane features a first-love story in hospital. A 12-year-old Jason Manford (Ellis Hollins) attracts female attention while waiting for what he tells them is a brain op (in fact a circumcision). Manford himself plays the boy's father, surgeon and nurse, inviting comparisons with Peter Kay.

The second features the stand-up career born of a terrible one-man show about Al Pacino. Omid Djalili recalls how a tobacconist changed his life, and how he literally fell into comedy. Former EastEnder Ashley Kumar plays the 22-year-old Djalili as an aspiring actor trying to break out of overearnest-theatre-group hell. Fun and sweet-natured if sprinkled with cringe.

A 12-year-old boy finds love on the eve of his circumcision. A failing young actor changes tack after a violent confrontation with the police. Yes, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas on Sky1, as tradition-in-the-making Little Crackers approaches the end of its third run of autobiographical comedy shorts. Jason Manford opens with the aforementioned tale of love and gross (and it really is gross) physical loss, helming a charming vignette that will warm the cockles of your heart. At 9.30pm, Omid Djalili tells a comforting and true tale of failure, involving a shambolic one-man show and a formative brush with the law. Shaky directorial debuts abound, at times to the point of distraction. But an amateurish wrapping job will always come second to what's inside it.