John Crace

The last time I saw Griff Rhys Jones on television was during the Jubilee pageant, when he was meandering up the Thames in a motor launch. I thought he looked miserable then, but that was nothing compared to how fed up he appeared presenting the first episode of the comedy panel quiz show, A Short History of Everything Else (Channel 4). Griff's script opened with: "We're off down memory lane without a seat belt ... because we didn't have to wear them in those days" and went downhill thereafter. His rictus smile throughout was almost certainly pain, though it would be more charitable to put it down to professionalism.

It wasn't just the script that was desperate: it was the concept as well. It was as though someone in the commissioning department had watched a couple of episodes of Have I Got News For You on Dave and come up with the brainwave of dispensing with topicality and making a news show that would feel like a repeat the first time you watched it. From round to round, the format never changed; Griff would make some crap gags to introduce a sequence of archive footage before inviting the two team captains - Marcus Brigstocke and Charlie Baker - along with guests Micky Flanagan and Kirsty Wark to make their own crap gags. I guess it was cheap, but it wasn't funny.

Brigstocke looked for a moment as if he thought he had actually wandered on to the set of a HIGNFY repeat as he gave a passable imitation of an extremely grumpy Paul Merton, looking permanently pissed off and not laughing at anyone else's jokes. But, on reflection, he was probably just annoyed he too had let himself be talked into signing up for such a turkey.

Satire just doesn't work on 30 year-old archive footage. Margaret Thatcher gags stopped having any edge the moment Ben Elton started making them in the 1980s. As for the old clips of Elton John having a tantrum and the 70s beer adverts ... For what it's worth, Charlie and Kirsty won by 15 points to 14. The result might seem rather more relevant in five years though, after the show has been repeated a few times.

Ruby Wax uniting fellow depressives online

Website aims to twin people with similiar symptoms.

In his preview of Black Mirror (Channel 4), Charlie Brooker offered The Twilight Zone as one of the key influences for his new Sunday night dramas. To the untrained eye, the first of them, National Anthem, looked suspiciously like political satire - and a very superior one - rather than a sci-fi vision of technology's power to distort the world. All the gadgetry seemed only too familiar and the voyeurism all too credible: there's more dystopia in an episode of Spooks.

Rather less credible was the premise in which we were asked to believe, that Princess Susannah - think Kate Middleton - had been abducted and that the kidnappers had threatened to kill her unless the prime minister - think David Cameron: really, please do, as you'll never be able to take him at all seriously again - had sex with a pig live on television. As it emerged right at the end that the kidnap was a piece of performance art by a Turner prize-winner, plausibility was further stretched to breaking point. Could you picture Tracey Emin holding up a police escort and abducting Kate? Or that no one would notice that the severed finger came from a man, not a woman?

Yet none of this really seemed to matter, as good satire often lies as much in the fun you have along the way as in the absurdity of the set-up. And where this scored heavily was in the way everything was played as near-straight drama. There was an inexorability about Rory Kinnear as a PM tortured by focus groups and Twitter stats, whose decision to fall on his pork sword is ultimately driven by how he will be perceived in the ratings, that was both touching and funny. And Lindsay Duncan's understated press secretary - no Malcolm Tucker she - was just a delight. "Don't get it over too quickly, sir," she advised, as the PM prepared for the performance of his life. "Otherwise, the public will think you are enjoying it rather too much." Brilliant.

Brooker is no shrinking violet - though he did rather skate around the bio-mechanics of getting a hard-on in the presence of a pig, so either he has some taste boundaries after all or inside knowledge of politicians' attraction to the trough - so naturally the PM was not spared closing his eyes and thinking of the polls. In so doing, he lost the love of his wife and gained the sympathy of the nation. So no getting any bright copycat ideas, anyone. Imagine having to feel sorry for Cameron.

TV review: Life's Too Short; Rev

Same old characters; same old celeb cameos: it's time for Ricky Gervais to move on.

Anticipating the flak Life's Too Short might provoke and opting to get his revenge in first, Ricky Gervais last week announced that he embraced the haters. After last night's first episode, it's not the haters Gervais need worry about. It's the thoroughly indifferent. The problem with this new series is not that it's offensive; it's that it's just not very funny. It took over eight minutes to raise the first smile - Warwick Davis falling out of the 4x4 - and the only real laugh came near the end when Liam Neeson tried to pitch a stand-up routine about Aids.

It all just seemed too familiar; partly because any element of surprise had long since gone thanks to the endless preview trailers and the PR campaign to reassure everyone that the show was basically politically correct, but mainly because it felt like the show you'd have written yourself if you were trying to write like Gervais. Push the boundaries of taste. Tick. Blur the real and the imagined. Tick. Rope in a few celebs. Tick. Take the money and run. Tick.

For those fortunate enough to miss all the hype - there must be one or two of you, I guess - Life's Too Short is a mockumentary about a dwarf actor whose career and marriage has hit the skids and is hoping to revive both by making a reality show of his life. In theory, this is as good a starting point for a comedy as any other. Failure, anger, hubris and self-delusion are key building blocks of much humour and there's plenty of potential for all four. Only it's seldom realised.

It's not so much Warwick Davis as the dwarf who is the problem, but Gervais and, to a lesser extent, his sidekick, Stephen Merchant. There's only so long you can go on writing and performing the same type of characters without boring your audience and the pair have passed the point of no return. We've seen Gervais humiliating Merchant in Extras, we've seen them both humiliating Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad. And the joke has worn thin by the time they play Warwick Davis's agents and bully him.

Increasingly, also, Gervais' own ego is getting in the way. There used to be a tension when real celebs started showing up in Extras because there was a lingering sense that they didn't quite know what they had let themselves in for and that the joke might be some way on them. That ambivalence is now long gone.

Gervais' own desperation for fame is now utterly transparent. Having seen him crave Johnny Depp's approval on The Graham Norton Show last week, it's become impossible to believe in his indifference to celebrity. Which rather kills the gag. And while you can't not be happy for Gervais that he's achieved the recognition his genius deserved, it's a bit of a shame for the rest of us that it seems to have - temporarily, I hope - nobbled his talent.

Rev is one of those rare beasts - a sitcom that actually gets funnier the better you know the characters. The first series took a bit of time to bed in, but the second hit the ground running. It opened with our inner-city vicar, Adam Smallbone, struggling to keep silent on a retreat - the first laugh came in under two minutes with Adam passing a nun and saying to himself, "Thank God I don't have to talk to her" before accidentally tripping up a mugger and getting lauded as a have-a-go hero.

Jokes aside, the joy of Rev lies in the characters. From Colin the drunk, through Alex the vicar's wife, to Robert the camp archdeacon, they all feel like people you might actually meet yourself. And would want to spend time with. The only slightly off note was Ralph Fiennes' cameo as the Bishop of London; but that was only because he seemed rather more in touch with normality than the real one. Quite deliberately, though, with little fanfare, Rev also gets to the heart of the modern church by exposing it as both a source of much goodness and a complete irrelevance. And that really is comic genius.

The new campus comedy got almost universally rave notices for its first outing last week, but some of the novelty seemed to have worn off by the second episode. There were still a few great gags but it all felt slightly laboured, in particular the usually wonderful Robert Webb as the needy, seedy geology lecturer - a character racing headlong into bad caricature. Most of all, at an hour, it just felt too long for the random emptiness of student life. Cut it in half and there's a potentially great comedy.

Then, maybe I'm not the best judge, as I'm scarcely the target audience. From what I've seen so far, the show was either written for the under-25s or for the completely stoned. Which rules me out on both counts.

Mount Pleasant was being touted as the new middle-class Shameless comedy-drama. It failed on every count. No laughs, no drama, no edge. All it had going for it was suspense: the mystery of how it got commissioned in the first place.

Morgana Robinson is the new comedy wunderkind who has gone straight from bit parts in cult shows to her own five part-series. But there's a huge gulf between being funny for 90 seconds in one sketch and holding together a whole 30 minutes. The opening sketch of Bozza as a schoolboy with Tourette syndrome was quite funny - if rather familiar - for about 20 seconds. Dragging it out for a couple of minutes killed it entirely. The rest of the show followed much the same pattern. At her best, Robinson is one of the sharpest and funniest comics around: unfortunately, this show didn't do her any favours.

There's been no good reason to watch Mock the Week since Frankie Boyle upped sticks, so I'd been looking forward to reviewing Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights. Unfortunately Channel 4 said there were no previews available, which is usually PR speak for "We don't think it's much good and we want to avoid it getting a kicking." Brian Logan has reviewed Tramadol Nights for us this morning to see if our fears were justified, though if Channel 4's decision to promote The Morgana Show, another new comedy series, instead is anything to go by then Frankie is dead in the water.