Jo Brand

This stand-up comedy show at the O2 Arena in London features a barnstorming roll-call of British comedians all stepping up to the mic in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. The bill includes Alan Carr, Bill Bailey, Catherine Tate, David Mitchell, The Fonejacker, Jack Dee, Jo Brand, Lee Evans, Michael McIntyre, Noel Fielding, Patrick Kielty, Rich Hall, Rob Brydon and Shappi Khorsandi. If you can't find somebody in that list who makes you laugh, it's possible that you have, indeed, had all your funny bones surgically removed.

Channel 4 Comedy Gala at the O2 Arena, London SE10

It was billed as "the biggest live stand-up show in UK history". But although this show in aid of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children featured 30-odd comics performing to 15,000 people, with more on video clips, in many ways it conformed to the usual rules of the charity gala. Some acts reminded you why they are stars (Lee Evans, Michael McIntyre, Jack Dee). Some were good enough to win a lot of new fans (Mark Watson, Kevin Bridges, Patrick Kielty, John Bishop, Rich Hall, Sean Lock). Some did their thing and did it well (Noel Fielding, Jo Brand). Barely anyone died a death. And, though the O2's 11pm curfew forestalled the usual overrun, cor, did Evans, the headliner, strike a chord when he imagined what we were thinking: "Pleeeeease, finish!"

Incredibly, this is the 20th anniversary and the 39th series of the BBC's flagship entertainment programme - the only entertainment programme that is consistently and genuinely entertaining. Paul Merton's unstoppable flow of surreal invention never seems to dry up, while Ian Hislop must be one of the few people on the planet who can appear on television suffering from a burst appendix and still manage to be funny. With an election looming, the big challenge of the new series - according to Richard Wilson, head of comedy at the production company Hat Trick - will be "to take the spectacularly dull things that politicians say and get laughs out of them". The host tonight is Lee Mack, with Alexander Armstrong and Jo Brand booked to appear later in the run.

Comedy Rocks with Jason Manford was a one-off end-of-the-pier ­special that simply wasn't cut out for telly. This is the 21st Century, where we ­expect short sharp punchy scenes and fast editing. As opposed to a guy from Liverpool doing 10 continuous minutes of stand-up.

OK for a night out. But on a night in... a ­definite no-no. Jason's amusing enough in a gentle sort of way. Jo Brand's a reliable old warhorse. And with throwaway lines like "My granddad was an Elvis ­impersonator - but there wasn't much call for that in 1938", squeaky Joe Pasquale had me laughing out loud.

Some Northern ­comic called John Bishop seemed to believe that blokes don't send text messages. Tell that to Ashley Cole.

All too old-fashioned. Despite contributions from up-to-date ­popsters Scouting For Girls and Pixie Lott, the entire production was like something from a bygone age.

Friday night not at the Palladium.

ITV launch their own take on Live At The Apollo with Mancunian comic Jason Manford. Comedy Rocks features stand-up from the likes of scouse man of the moment John Bishop plus Jo Brand and bright young comic, er, Joe Pasquale. The show will be filmed the day before transmission so expect plenty of topical gags. As if that wasn't funny enough, there's live music from Pixie Lott and Scouting For Girls.

Jason Manford hosts a new Friday-night variety show, which is recorded the day before transmission to keep it as topical as possible. "It's a mixture of music and comedy," he says. "But the music will all be live and the comedy will be varied. Among the performers will be John Bishop, Jo Brand and (to mix it up a bit) Joe Pasquale." Manford is the ideal choice as presenter. Most people don't like being screamed at at the end of the week and he is a relaxed and genial comedian - a bit like the pleasant bloke in the pub who makes his mates laugh with gentle stories about the oddities of his family. With luck his personality will set the tone, although the words "ITV" and "variety show" together have an ominous ring.

On the press release, host Jason Manford describes his new show, ominously, as a "variety event" - as in "I'm really looking forward to being part of this variety event on ITV." I'm fairly sure those words never passed his lips, but the PR-speak is revealing: it's intended to be "event" TV - that is, a big show with a live, shiny feel to it. And to ward off too many comparisons with Live at the Apollo (surely an inspiration), they're playing up the "variety" idea, because there will be music acts, too, namely Pixie Lott and Scouting for Girls. As well as Manford, Jo Brand, Joe Pasquale, ventriloquist Paul Zerdin and "Merseyside's motormouth" John Bishop will provide the laughs.

This variety show is the equivalent of a late-period Oasis album - some of the people involved may once have been vaguely entertaining (Jason Manford, John Bishop and Jo Brand) but it's far too broad strokes (Joe Pasquale, Pixie Lott), it'll have a title that means nothing, and you know that you probably wouldn't get on with anyone who really likes it.

Having interviewed him a couple of times, we know Manford has good taste in comedy. Unfortunately, he's never going to be able to display that taste and will probably have to settle for being a wittier Peter Kay-lite. Imagine having to introduce Scouting For Girls as a career: it's no job for a man.

Comediennes are not the most conventionally alluring creatures on television - Dawn French, Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, to name a few, have often exploited their comfortable shape to hilarious ends.

So it will come as no surprise that striking funny-girl Olivia Lee, whose one-woman sketch show - Dirty, Sexy, Funny - starts on Comedy Central next week, has struggled to marry her glamorous appearance with her comic buffoonery.

"It has been hard sometimes getting people to take me seriously as a comedienne because people look at me and think: 'She's not going to be funny', says Olivia, 29. But that's a good thing because I am changing the cliched perception and bringing a bit of glam to it. You don't have to look funny to be funny - and there are always prosthetics which I can use in some of the sketches, although that is more for disguise in the hidden-camera bits."

Mistimed for Halloween, but well-timed as the thirteenth episode, QI continued its "G" series with a look at "Gothic". This was probably one of my favourite episodes in quite some time, not least because I'm saturnine enough to appreciate ghoulish trivia about gargoyles (they're actually water-spouts, the purely decorative ones are called "grotesques"), zombies (it would take about a month for one zombie to infect the entire world), novelty coffins (a modern tradition in Ghana, apparently), etc. Plus, great comedy does tend to bubble up from the darker corners of the human experience. To that end, misanthrope Jack Dee and the cynicism of Jimmy Carr were employed well, and Sue Perkins proved (where Sandy Toksvig and Jo Brand have failed to this year) that, yes, women on panel shows can be funny! Spooky.