Jo Brand

The feast of comic shorts continues with Jo Brand and Bill Bailey's offerings. Brand whisks us back to 1972 - when she is a hormonal teenager in a strop because her parents have moved house and her beloved cat Fluff is missing. But it's when the fondue set comes out that things get really ugly. In Bailey's wonderfully zany film, he's a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park when the technological world turns against him. Only through the voice in the pay-and-display machine will he find redemption.

Grumpy seems to be Jo Brand's default setting, and this comic short focusing on a pivotal moment of her young life may explain her apparent resignation to life being a series of injustices. If it wasn't hard enough that she and her family have to move home due to money problems, her beloved cat then vanishes. Even when her fortunes then take a turn for the better and she makes a new pal, that brief moment of happiness is punctured by an incident involving her missing moggy...

Only something special could nudge Victoria Wood out of stand-up exile, and this gig in aid of the British Heart Foundation is certainly a very good reason indeed. It may be a decade since she's performed as a stand-up, but you'd never guess, and she's as sharp as ever. For the other ladies on the bill, who include Jo Brand, Julia Davis, Katy Brand,
Isy Suttie, and Roisin Conaty, she's still quite an inspiration.

The excellent Little Crackers series continues with two more autobiographical comic shorts. First, at 9.00pm, Jo Brand takes us back to 1972, a time when fondue sets were all the rage and the comedian was a hormonal teenager sulking because her parents had moved house. Then, in the second of tonight's instalments at 9.15pm, Bill Bailey plays a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park.

More remembrances of things past, this time from Jo Brand and Bill Bailey. Brand sets the controls for the heart of 1972 where her teenage self is having a bad time of it. Her family has money worries, they are moving town and she's being bullied at her new school - until she meets her saviour Susan Pigg. Bailey takes a different approach to the other Little Crackers by not setting his story in his childhood. He plays himself, a grouch who doesn't know the meaning of Christmas spirit.

Time to forget all your troubles, kick back, relax and laugh at a show you probably saw back in April. The O2 Arena plays host to literally quite a few comedians in a show put on to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity; so even if the likes of Jack Whitehall, Jason Manford, Michael McIntyre and James Corden aren't funny then at least some good will come from this. There are plenty of good turns here as well from David Mitchell, Jo Brand, Sean Lock and Kevin Eldon.

Running nightly this week are this year's seasonal shorts little crackers from Sky One, which annually tries to make up for the dearth of decent original drama and comedy from January-November by gorging us with a festive selection box featuring some of the best-known names in the business.

This time they've got the likes of Victoria Wood, Catherine Tate, Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke, Julian Barratt, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey - oh, the list goes on, basically anyone who's ever appeared on a panel game is either appearing in, writing or directing one of these 12-minute films, mostly based on autobiographical stories about their childhoods.

And like a selection box, there are a few yucky praline noisette ones. David Baddiel's film is as annoying as he is, though it does feature a good impersonation of Record Breakers star Norris McWhirter by Alastair McGowan, who must have been delighted to get a chance to do an impression he probably last did as a child. Chris O'Dowd has a dull grumpy Santa story and Dawn French oddly casts herself as the late Queen Mother.

But there are some nice strawberry cream ones too: Victoria Wood's is a sweet, nostalgic tale, Julian Barratt's teenaged heavy metallers are quirky and Kathy Burke's memory of meeting Joe Strummer is endearing. Anyway, they're all over so quickly that even the ho-hum ones are watchable enough - shame though that for Sky, decent original programmes come barely more than once a year.

Victoria Wood directs this loosely autobiographical story about a Lancashire girl whose dismal Christmas is transformed upon visiting a merry neighbour. Hers is the first of a dozen bite-sized films written by and starring the cream of British comedy - Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey, Jo Brand - shown in double bills. Next up tonight is Chris O'Dowd's impish tale about the time he ambushed that white-bearded, milk- and mince pie-pinching trickster in red. Nine-year-old Chris is as lippy a rapscallion as you might expect, while O'Dowd takes the role of disgruntled supermarket Santa and Sharon Horgan is terrific as harassed Mum.

A nightly season of short autobiographical films featuring some of Britain's best comic talent opens tonight with stories by Victoria Wood and Chris O'Dowd. Dawn French, Stephen Fry, Bill Bailey, Kathy Burke, Jo Brand and Catherine Tate are among those writing, narrating and starring in these seasonal dramatisations of their lives, often with stories recalled from their childhood. It's a bit hit-and-miss. Wood's is on first, though hers is the only story not to feature a younger version of herself. The IT Crowd's O'Dowd follows with an amusing story of why as a boy he thought Santa was a "big weirdo".

Getting On: my triumvirate of heroines

Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Jo Scanlan have gifted us a TV classic with their touchingly comic window on the NHS.