Jasper Rees

theartsdesk Q&A: Writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson

Fifty years on, the creators of Steptoe and Son explain its enduring appeal as the classic sitcom is revived onstage.

The Mimic/Anna & Katy, Channel 4

Promising sitcom riffs on the impersonator with no personality, plus a new female sketch duo.

Female double acts are rare enough to be treasured, which is why it was no fun at all to see Watson & Oliver take an undeserved pasting in theartsdesk's comment stream, mostly from blokes, when it debuted on the BBC last year. Anna Crilly and Katy Wix, who write as well as star, take light entz idioms as their springboard: Eurolottery shows, cookery programmes, workplace docusoaps, reality. The performances are a treat - Crilly's turn as a dour housekeeper in Lead Balloon is clearly just one string to her bow - but the material doesn't feel quite honed enough. There's a dash of verbal incontinence, a bit of Gervaisery, some Dom Jolyesque physical surrealism and lashings of protean vocals. The most original gag features a Joan Collins-alike who requires a prompter to tell her own life story. The funniest line in this episode came as Martin Kemp (one of several game guest stars) plugged his new CD on a Benelux channel. "Great piss!" said Dix's enthusiastic presenter. After two episodes this is more like quite good piss.

The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.

Martin Hurdle - even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical company. There is no hope of promotion from whitewashing graffiti off walls, so he disappears into a multi-coloured vocal hinterland where he can be any number of camp television presenters or, in the sharpest sequence, James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman engaging in a Socratic squabble over who has the better Afro-American larynx for narrating documentaries about penguins.

This ability has not brought Martin any more joy away from work. He lives with Jean (Jo Hartley), a female flatmate who is equally propping up the bar at midlife's last-chance saloon. For all the richness of Martin's interior life set against his humdrum routine, The Mimic could easily struggle to escape its binary parameters, but this first episode swiftly introduced a second outlandish scenario: Martin has discovered that he may have fathered a child 18 years earlier. It's all subject to a DNA test, but when they meet in a pub, the boy is soon crossing his fingers that they won't be related after all. This is a worry Martin articulates to himself through the conduit of Wedding Crashers. "If I didn't know who this guy was, and it turned out to be this guy," says Vince Vaughn, " I would be pretty disappointed." Or was it Owen Wilson?

It'll be worth finding out where The Mimic, already promisingly weird, goes from here. A lot rests on how series creator Matt Morgan marries two distinctly left-field scenarios - incurable impersonator discovers he's sired an adult. It certainly revinvents a branch of entertainment that has felt for a while like a busted flush.

Black Mirror, Series Two, Channel 4

Charlie Brooker updates Swift in a tale of the unexpected about the grieving process.

theartsdesk Q&A: comedian Rowan Atkinson

The face of Blackadder and Mr Bean on a life spent entertaining and taking on a tragicomedy.

The last time PG Wodehouse was a hit on the small screen was a good couple of decades back when Fry and Laurie slipped into the apparel of Jeeves and Wooster. Bally good fun it was too. Since then, the frightful cads and dishy heiresses of Wodehouse's world have had to carry on flapping in print. Here, however, comes Blandings, adapted from Wodehouse's series of rural capers set in prelapsarian Shropshire.

Rather than lavish oodles of budget on a spiffing primetime rival to Downton, the BBC have sensibly positioned Blandings as a Sunday early evening entertainment for all the family. From the moment the Empress, Lord Emsworth's prizewinningly sizeable pig, unleashes her first flatulent fanfare, the scheduling looks (and sounds) vindicated. Cast as his Lordship is Timothy Spall, suggesting just a whiff of the maxim that all pigs look like their owners. As Connie, his termagant of a sister, Jennifer Saunders often threatens to harrumph off to her room if she doesn't get her way. Deprived of the jaunty, silken music of Wodehouse's prose, we are yet to find out why this dire warning is quite such a bad thing.

With Lost in Austen, Guy Andrews has already proved a dab hand at paying tribute to much loved literature while luring it towards the present day. Sometimes here he meddles a little too assertively. When Freddy Emsworth (Jack Farthing) was busy getting the Old Bill drunk in order to break ex-cowboy Jimmy (James Norton) out of jug, pleasing strains of rag and Charleston made way for anachronistic boogie-woogie. Meanwhile some jokes are going to sail over the heads of a younger audience. Freddy alluded - a touch too louchely for teatime - to the Pink Pussy Club. And nowadays not everyone is going to laugh at this one: "Harrow? Yes I guessed he'd known corruption in his youth." But it's fun and doesn't think the world of itself.

Miranda Hart returned with a Boxing Day special to kick off a third series. Like many a comedy before it, the shtick is to take a daffy comedienne and fictionalise her neuroses as entertainment. Essentially postmodern slapstick, the sitcom trades in laughing at its own pratfalls, which in this episode consisted of Miranda tripping over things, getting drenched by things, getting her clothing stuck in things and, as ever, eating sweet things. Such fun? Yes, but a little of Miranda's infantilised portrait of 30something singledom goes a surprisingly long way.

A Young Doctor's Notebook, Sky Arts 1

The comic texture is mostly of the relentless, high-octane variety typical of Russian satire.

Misfits - Series 4 preview

A fourth series sees a badger cull of probationers with special powers.