John Walsh

Sarah Millican: Gossip girl

She's the unlikeliest comedy hit of the year - the one-time lowly civil servant from South Shields whose total candour and killer punchlines have won her a vast audience.

Dirk Gently, BBC4, Thursday

Douglas Adams' 1980s crime caper was set in the present, but you wouldn't know it from the jokes.

I don't think I'll be rushing back to The Trip, which started its six-episode run on Monday. Those who've seen Michael Winterbottom's film A Cock and Bull Story, a surreal treatment of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, will recall the droll rivalry of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, playing themselves when the periwigs came off. Watching Coogan's face as he realised Brydon could do a better impression of him than he could of himself was priceless. Winterbottom now films the two funny men going on a road trip in a Land Rover. Coogan has invited Brydon to join him on a one-week restaurant tour of the North for a Sunday newspaper. He needs a companion because he's split from his girlfriend, Mischa.

So here they are, our gigglesome pair, at The Inn at Whitewell, booking in and - oh no! - there's only one room and they may have to share a bed! Brydon is fine about this. Coogan isn't. "You might touch my bottom," he says. They joke about child abuse, swap photos of their children (not at all inappropriate) and compete, over dinner, to see who can do a better Michael Caine impression. Some needling between them goes unexplained. Coogan doesn't seem to like Brydon much, and criticises him a lot - so why has he invited him on the trip? But the conversations are so desultory, and the straining after wit ("Is there such a thing as an autistic impressionist? That's you") so plain dull, you feel they deserve each other's leaden company. I can't wait to read the restaurant reviews.

Is Monty Python's Flying Circus dead as a parrot?

The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus was broadcast 40 years ago today. John Walsh dusts off the tapes to see if the old ones really are the best.

Funny peculiar: The curious world of Vic Reeves

Never in the field of light entertainment has one man spawned such a collection of nonsensical catchphrases as Vic Reeves.