John Walsh

Cariad Lloyd on her hit podcast Griefcast

Comedian and writer Cariad Lloyd opens up about grief and interviewing other comedians for her award-winning podcast.

Alexei Sayle interview

The 80s stand-up legend on drugs, communist dentists, and the comedy revolution.

Monty Python Live review

I was a fan of Monty Python from the start, and it pains me to criticise them. But this is desperately lazy production.

Graham Norton: The go-to guy for anything

He is a sarcastic, breezily insulting and camply subversive gay Irish pixie who has become the most ubiquitous presenter on TV. How has he managed it?

Derek: Funny how Ricky Gervais's show lacks laughs

Gervais's latest addition to his comedy menagerie grates more than it amuses.

How Billy Connolly calmed down

His new film is directed by Dustin Hoffman, stars Dame Maggie and is set in an old people's home. Now he has joined the Hollywood firmament (and turned 70), does anything get under the Big Yin's skin these days?

The second series of Vexed, possibly the most irritating cop show ever known, has got under way. It's billed as a "comedy-drama police procedural", a portmanteau phrase that chills the blood. It stars Toby Stephens as DI Jack Armstrong. Jack is cool, laconic, leather-jacketed and drives an old Mercedes sports car. He's a flirtatious ladies' man. He doesn't play by the rules. He has no time for research or paperwork. For some reason he speaks with a mid-Atlantic drawl ("We're working on the assumption that he died from a bloadertha head."). To his horror, his new partner is cool, feisty, know-all feminist DI Georgina Dixon (Miranda Raison) who's a better driver than he, interrupts his poker game to check on progress, and raises a half-indulgent eyebrow at his rampant sexism. Wearing a coat zipped up to the neck, she's basically Emma Peel from The Avengers, and Ms Raison plays her with watchable spirit and aplomb.

God knows what Stephens thinks he is, but his character comes across as an 18-carat arsehole. And God knows what BBC2 is doing giving air space to this queasy, misconceived hybrid of Dempsey and Makepeace and Carry on Copper.

The central conceit was that a succession of famous women from history subject themselves to the enquiries of a shrink, played with cooing aplomb by Rebecca Front. Joan of Arc is shown to be a petulant teen in a breastplate who justifies herself by saying "God made me do it", Eva Braun lists the virtues of her new boyfriend ("When he walks into a room, everyone really respects him") before confiding, "He might be a bit of a racist", and Beatrix Potter reveals that animals tell her mucky stories.

I laughed immoderately at Sharon Horgan's portrayal of Frida Kahlo with a long droopy moustache, blithely ignoring the shrink's subtle enquiries ("Is it possible that you've ... cultivated something that might be keeping him at arm's length?") and at Sheila Reid doing Mother Teresa as a chain-smoking Northern harridan. But the humour relied tiresomely on the juxtaposition of primness and smut, on Jane Austen and blowjobs, the Bible and bonking. In one sketch, Mary Whitehouse reveals a liking for gay porn. Mary Whitehouse? Which decade are we in now?

At times I wished the women had been invited to improvise. They might have brought some welcome diversion from the writers' one-track minds.

The attractiveness of the British teenager may be as hard to detect as the Higgs boson particle, but it doesn't stop TV producers from putting more and more of them before the cameras for our inspection. Following the success of Skins and The Inbetweeners comes Pramface, a comedy of virginity, sex and pregnancy (yes, in that order) among the GCSE-sitting classes, and the discomfiture of their parents.

Sweet-faced but lecherous Jamie (Sean Michael Verey) and his conceited babe-magnet friend Mike (Dylan Edwards) are 16, have just finished their exams and are anxious to crash a party thrown by cooler and more grown-up schoolkids. "There may be scenes of a sexual nature," confides Mike, who wears green shirts with Harry Hill collars, sprays Lynx in his underpants and has made a shag-along soundtrack on his iPhone that ends with the theme to Top Gear. Elsewhere, pretty, 18-year-old A-leveller Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) has been grounded for smoking dope. She has a turn of phrase that shocks her anxious parents, Anna Chancellor and Angus Deayton: "It's not as if you found me snorting coke or straddling my pimp"; "To you the world's just one big fucking naughty step isn't it?" Naturally she escapes the prison of home by falling out of the window and at the posh party she drunkenly kisses Jamie. Minutes later, they are dancing the blanket hornpipe on a leopardskin throw in someone's bedroom, while Jamie's girlfriend Beth attempts to crawl out the door.

Weeks later, along with her A-levels, Laura gets another result: she's pregnant. She has no recollection of her inamorata, only a phone number. When they arrange to meet in a café, she makes for the promising-looking chap sitting by himself, but gets it wrong: the father of her child is the geeky kid at the other table. Oh, no! He's 16, she's 18 - an unbridgeable gap - she has a croissant in the microwave and their young lives are blighted for ever. Or are they?

Chris Reddy dreamt up Pramface and wrote the script, directed by Daniel Zeff. It has nice touches: when Laura rings the number scrawled on a note, to say, "We slept together and now I'm pregnant", she dials the wrong number and her voice is beamed to the phone-speaker of a car driven by a startled bourgeois with his family. But it's all so derivative. Do we need any more jerking-off jokes, orgasm faces, drunk-girl pratfalls? There's a deal too much Americana here too: the plot's straight from Knocked Up; the party scenes of interchangeable babes owe a lot to Beverly Hills 90210; Laura's taut family supper echoes American Beauty. Lacking the rude conviction of The Inbetweeners, it comes over as The Hand-Me-Downers.

The newest thing in comedy sketch shows - and doesn't that very phrase feel antediluvian? - is Watson & Oliver, well known to Edinburgh Fringe audiences. They're an appealing duo. Ingrid Oliver has a thrillingly low voice - Fiona Bruce meets Victoria Coren - she's a dead ringer for Myleene Klass (who is duly ridiculed), and she can really act. Lorna Watson is blond, brittle and has to work harder for laughs. Their opening gambit was a direly old-fashioned bit of sub-Morecambe & Wise before-the-show backchat, but, once they settled down, their sketches were inventive and unusual. In a spoof of a TV Jane Austen serial, the mob-capped duo tittered like six-year-olds about pin cushions to a pair of bored Mr Darcys, then switched abruptly to double entendre. ("Our dance cards - we eagerly await the filling of our slots by two special gentlemen.") A Victoria Wood-style pastiche of 1950s ladies' kitchen conversation - all pinnies and hair-rollers - was surreally punctuated by Watson's response-appropriate eyebrows. A greasy-spoon café became a symphony of shouts and orders in which everyone called everyone else "darling" - "Cup o'tea, darlin'?" "Keep the change, my darlin'" - until someone silenced the room by saying "Love". In what is clearly meant to be the show's signature sketch, the girls do their impression of Prince William and Kate tucked up in bed, unable to find anything to talk about except their wedding day. But couldn't they have found a better punchline subject than Pippa Middleton's over-prodded rump?

The best sketch imagined two Playboy bunnies squeaking competitively about how pink their living quarters were, how appealing their fake boobs, how delightful their lives, until they were summoned to cuddle up to the saurian Hefner. Between retchings, they competed as to which had a better excuse not to fulfil this noisome duty. It was a gift of a subject to these two funny, appealing women, and they seized it with unladylike glee. I look forward to seeing a lot more of them.