Jessica Hynes

There were some a nice moments, like the countdown clock that ran backwards from 2012 to the present day. The joke was particularly piquant because the following day in what we still touchingly call "real life", the actual 2012 countdown clock broke down.

But aside from Hugh Bonneville as the ODC's stressed boss and Jessica Hynes as an aggressively dim PR, the characters were not precisely enough drawn, relying instead on types and tropes from The Office. Even so, it was worth it for the running joke of suitable candidates to be the national torchbearer. The winner was Gok Wan.

Twenty Twelve is a timely satire following the travails of the fictional team behind the 2012 London Olympics. The mockumentary has been chronically overused of late, but Twenty Twelve can be forgiven, firstly because it works so well and secondly because writer/creator/ director John Morton pioneered the format with the brilliant People Like Us.

The show charts the many catastrophes, both large and small, that already beset the Olympic project long, long before any spike disturbs the asphalt or a javelin is hurled in anger.

Finding a sustainable use for a Tae Kwon Do stadium, sorting out traffic congestion, dealing with obstinate artists, channeling Boris Johnson's enthusiasm and launching a faltering countdown clock are amongst the challenges of episode one. In a delicious case of life imitating art, the actual 2012 countdown clock broke down on the day of its unveiling, shortly after the satire was broadcast.

Hugh Bonneville provides star power as project leader Ian, but every scene is shamelessly stolen by Jessica Hynes as ignorant, neurotic, gibberish-spouting public relations guru Siobhan. David Tennant, meanwhile, provides the straight-faced narration.

There will come a time soon, after the cost is tallied and the results examined, when the 2012 London Olympics will be no laughing matter. Until then, it's fair game. Writer/director John Morton previously helmed the great People Like Us, and here the tone is similar and the standard just as high.

Set in the Olympics Deliveries Committee, complete with dreadful logo, we meet the excellent cast - Hugh Bonneville, Olivia Coleman, Jessica Hynes, Vincent Franklin - as they prepare to relaunch their website.

A terrific start, mostly stolen by Hynes's spot-on PR agent.

John Morton, writer/director behind People like Us and Broken News, has a potential hit on his hands with this timely, engaging docuspoof. Narrated by David Tennant, it charts the bungling activities of the Olympic Deliverance Commission, a small team led by Ian Fletcher (redoubtable Hugh Bonneville), whose task is to smooth the run-up to 2012. On this week's agenda: nominating national heroes to be torchbearers (so that's, erm, Alan Sugar, Bruce Forsyth, Gok Wan...) and repurposing the tae kwon do stadium after the Games.

Every character in the ODC team shows promise, with Jessica Hynes amusingly maddening as PR bod Siobhan Sharp, whose assertiveness is exceeded only by her ineptitude ("Matthew Pinsent? I don't even know who that is"). She ends up babbling at the Tate Modern launch of her pet project - a hideous, green clock that mystifyingly counts backwards from 2012 to today. Seb and Boris, of course, get frequent name-checks and at least one of them will show up later in the series. It's a runner.

Deliciously skewering everyone from marketing creatives and PRs to web designers, John Morton's mockumentary (narrated by David Tennant) about the "Olympic Deliverance" team preparing for 2012 appears both painful and probable. It is the characterisation that is so sharp and knowing, while the execution is all the better for its subtlety.

Heading the team is the exasperated Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), who frequently despairs in his hapless staff. Aside from the bluff Nick Jowett (Vincent Franklin), who is prone to uttering, "I don't care who you are. I'm sorry, I'm from Yorkshire and I'm not having it", Fletcher is painted as the only one with a glimmer of competence. An early crisis is that the 2012 countdown clock has been designed by a curmudgeonly British artist, who refuses to explain how it works, or admit that it is flawed. It was commissioned by Head of Brand, Siobhan Sharpe (Jessica Hynes), a firm believer in "adspeak", who is often framed as clueless. Her suggestions for national heroes to be Olympic torch-bearers include Bruce Forsyth and Gok Wan, and she confuses the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy with the Welsh singer Duffy. Meanwhile, her colleague Kay Hope (Amelia Bullmore), Head of Sustainability, wonders if the taekwondo hall might make a good donkey sanctuary once the Games themselves are finished.

God, it's miserable, isn't it? Seriously. The world is a horrible, depressing mess. Even comedies make you want to cry. (Have you seen that last episode of Partridge?). So Twenty Twelve runs into a tvBite office wanting a laugh so badly, if we saw a pigeon at Wimbledon, we'd actually join in the hilarity. It's a good pedigree, written by John Morton, the maker of People Like Us, a brilliant show struck down by Glitteritis.

It suffers a tad by comparison to other office-based, hyper-real sitcoms, in that post-Office and Thick Of It, we've now seen workplace incompetence milked for just about every laugh. But that's about the only problem. The writing is sharp, the hook of the Olympics is a decent one and even if it wasn't any good, Jessica Hynes would drag it across the finish line anyway, turning in a show-stealing performance as a ditzy PR.

Meet the Twenty Twelve team

Twenty Twelve, a new six-part comic documentary series starring Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes, begins next week on BBC Four.

Comedians re-create childhood photos

Take a dozen comedians, add some snaps from the family album, mix them all up and what do you get? Featuring Alan Carr, Miranda Hart, Greg Davies, Jessica Hynes, Sarah Millican, Dom Joly, Jason Byrne, Shappi Khorsandi, Chris Addison, Jimmy Carr, Russell Howard and Jon Holmes.

Leading up to the British Comedy Awards, Comic's Choice invited five celebrated comedians - Alan Davies, Sean Lock, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes, Lee Mack - to choose a shortlist and winner from among their own personal past favourites. Bill Bailey played affable host, something he does effortlessly.

Forgetting for one moment the universally acknowledged truth that no comic truly enjoys any laughter they haven't themselves produced, the show's premise was flimsy in the extreme. Not to mention confusing - Alan Davies nominated Chris Morris as Best Breakthrough Act for work done in 1994.

Davies also took part in a film recreation of an unsuccessful audition he once attended, as gratuitous a piece of padding as I have seen in a long time. This lack of coherence was reflected in the meaningless studio set design which threw together leather armchairs, old boilers, stuffed elk heads and bicycles combined to create the effect of a gentleman's club located in a garage.

Basically Comic's Choice was yet another excuse to disinter old archive clips instead of producing fresh comedy. Although, having said that, the archive clips were rather excellent, so I'm not complaining too loudly.

When actors talk warmly about other actors who inspired them, the results are embarrassing, as a rule. But the same doesn't apply to comedians, for some reason: get them talking about other comics and the results can be tart, revealing and funny. That's the idea here as part of the extra hoo-ha that Channel 4 is drumming up around next week's British Comedy Awards. The idea is that Bill Bailey chats to a different comedian each night about his or her comedy heroes. What are their all-time favourite shows and which comedian would they give their own personal award to? Bailey begins with selections from Alan Davies - always smarter than he pretends to be - and later in the week there's hero worship from Lee Mack, Jo Brand, Jessica Hynes and Sean Lock.