Jimmy Carr

One of the few festive programmes where the people on screen are normally drunker than the viewers. Jimmy Carr again presides over a panel game that usually attracts a good deal of correspondence from people who like to be offended at Christmas.

The passing of legislation earlier this year forcing Jack Whitehall to be included in all comedy programmes on all channels was controversial, but - perhaps due to some sort of hangover from his competitive days as a public schoolboy - he's well suited to the quiz format.

Whitehall and fellow bellower Jonathan Ross have gentler comic minds to offset them, answering questions about the past 12 months of news: Kristen Schaal is this year's woman, and there's also Richard Ayoade, who's effortlessly defused this gnarly bearpit in past Big Fat Quizzes. Plus, Noel Fielding and Dara O'Briain.

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It was Super Monday this week - the comedy industry's equivalent to Super Thursday, when publishers flood the bookshops with celebrity memoirs and other sure-sellers for the festive market. So on Monday DVDs by Miranda Hart, Reginald D. Hunter, Micky Flanagan, Jack Dee, Eddie Izzard, Jimmy Carr, Bill Bailey, Seann Walsh, Keith Lemon and others hit the shelves.

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Jimmy Carr interview

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After buying a house with a tennis court attached, Jonathan Ross developed a love of the game that finds him knocking up with a comedy coterie including Michael McIntyre, Jimmy Carr and David Baddiel. Tips from a Wimbledon champion are quite another thing, though, and having predicted that Andy Murray would triumph earlier this year, Ross welcomes him to the sofa to relive his glories.

They're joined by Celine Dion, whose new studio album Loved Me Back To Life is her first big English-language release since 2007. Perhaps unfairly, neither Murray nor Dion are known for their comedy punchlines, so Johnny Vegas and John Barrowman will be bringing the funny.

Regardless of the fact that the TV schedules are already rammed with the damned things, all sharing near-identical formats, television continues to spew out comedy panel shows. Channel 4's Was It Something I Said? is the latest manifestation of a tedious trend.

The basic premise, upon which the contestants are invited to riff, is the world of quotes and quotations. A world very familiar to anyone who has listened to an edition of BBC Radio 4's Quote... Unquote during its 49 series' residency.

But originality clearly isn't high on Was It Something I Said?'s priorities. Take a look at the line-up - David Mitchell in the chair, Richard Ayoade and Micky Flanagan as team captains, and Charlie Higson and Jimmy Carr as guests.

Individually, I like them all. Collectively, as part of a comedy panel show, their terrible familiarity provokes in me a level of screaming boredom that is borderline hysterical.

Even the fine actor David Harewood, roped in as guest 'reader', has been spotted slumming it elsewhere in the BBC's Would I Lie to You?. Presumably, Harewood's ambition was atomised at the end of Homeland's second series, along with his character.

But possibly the most predictable and depressing aspect of the show was its total absence of women. Whether this was the deliberate product of an anti-feminist agenda, or simply down to the fact that Sarah Millican wasn't available, we can only guess.