Jasper Rees

What makes a radio comedy funny on TV?

Paul Whitehouse's Nurse was an audio treat, now it's a visual treat too. What's the secret, asks Jasper Rees.

There are still ideas that don't really have legs, and still they are finding their way past the green light. Take Cockroaches, a new offering from ITV2. The idea of Freddy Syborn's script is that a nuclear holocaust has wiped out most of humanity, leaving teen couple Tom and Suze (Daniel Lawrence Taylor and Esther Smith) to roam the rural wastelands with their small child, conceived in haste on the night the bomb changed everything.

Essentially, it's the classic Seventies drama Survivors with jokes. That's the theory anyway, but alas the laughs are few and far between. The first few minutes, before disaster strikes, promised much. A newscaster warned of impending Armageddon, adding that no one had bothered to tell Africa and South America. The British Prime Minister (Robert Bathurst, not his first time as a comic PM: see also Hislop and Newman's comedy My Dad's the Prime Minister) was happier answering questions in Latin, a bit like You Know Who.

Spool forward a decade, and the future looked very like the past: jokes about not getting any sex, about in-laws, about cultural reference points (Suze reminisced about a blessed yesteryear in which "we had music, we had literature, we had Ant and Dec"). Suze supplied precious breast milk to both father and daughter, a joke much more creepily explored in Little Britain. The cast enlarged when they encountered a tribe of wood-dwelling dropouts led by Oscar (the ubiquitous Jack Whitehall), a Jafaican-spouting trustafarian ("Who talks like that?" wondered Tom). By the end of the first episode, attempting to enact the climactic immolation from The Wicker Man, he had been defeated. Tom accidentally hacked off his wanking finger.

If you like that joke [about masturbation], then you'll enjoy the wanking rota in Crims. This new sitcom is set in a young offenders' institution where Luke and Jason (Elis James and Kadiff Kirwan) have lately been banged up. The main joke is that Luke, wrongfully imprisoned, is eager to stay out of trouble but can't help incurring the wrath of both staff and inmates while also worrying about his faithless girlfriend. James is a likeable presence, and despite looking about 10 years too old for the role, finds different ways to play panic, fear and anxiety.

The script is by Adam Kay and Dan Swimer, whose basic premise has more going for it than Cockroaches and yet, with the fusillade of gags about bodily fluids, body parts and sexual incontinence, it feels as if the bar has been set too low. It's no excuse pinning the blame on the BBC Three demographic. This was the channel which proved with Gavin & Stacey that it knows how to involve organs not located in the underwear region, such as the brain and the heart. Winston Stanley Fletcher can rest easy in his grave.

Bad Education, BBC Three, review: 'puerile'

Bad Education is so-so comedy, a puerile teenage rampage written by adults who should know better.

His Master's Voice preview

"There's no great satire going on," says Rob Brydon, who expertly voices both characters in His Master's Voice. "But it was done with aplomb. I suppose in that time somebody being cheeky to authority was very appealing."

Richard Wilson, interview: 'A lot of Scots hate me'

TV star Richard Wilson is also a thriving stage director and actor. At 78, he's about to tackle Samuel Beckett again, he tells Jasper Rees.

Review: Episodes, Series 3, BBC Two

Any laughs left in the special-relationship com-com with Matt LeBlanc?

10 Questions for Ventriloquist Nina Conti

Can you go on holiday without Monkey and not miss him? Yes, I could but now my three-year-old son won't let me.

Review: The Trip to Italy, BBC Two

The Trip is a hall of mirrors put together with the help of Heath Robinson. It's a comedy vehicle in which pretty much the only thing that's real is the actual vehicle.

The Life of Rock with Brian Pern, BBC Four

Move over Spinal Tap, Simon Day updates the mockumentary genre.