Johnny Vegas

Nothing disappoints a British holidaymaker quite like a successful trip away; at least that's the comedy premise that's explored in the third season of this comedy. After the chaos surrounding their previous trip, we join our roster of British stereotypes gathering on a non-airconditioned coach in order to enjoy their compensatory free holiday. We then watch as this gift horse is looked in the mouth: it's like The Royle Family, but with sunburn. The amiable Geoff (Johnny Vegas) is an enjoyable feature, the incredibly caustic Madge (Sheila Reid) a riotously unlovable grandma.

Forget your sun, sea and sex - it's more like sunburn, swearing and mobility scooters. All the familiar faces are back for a third series at the Solana resort in Benidorm. After the rooftop hijack they've been offered a free vacation as compensation, which explains why they just can't keep away from this all-inclusive holiday hell.

Episodes are now an hour long but, apart from that, little has changed except that timid Martin (Nicholas Burns) has finally split from his wife. He turns up with a new companion, a sexy Scouser named Brandy (Sheridan Smith). He insists they're just friends, although she seems too far out of his league to even be a distant acquaintance.

The Oracle (Johnny Vegas) is being driven mad by poolside puzzlers and Mel is opening a new store where his bad luck with electricity looks set to continue.

Derren Litten's Costa-del-Hell comedy returns for a third series. It's the same gallery of grotesques who gather once again by the pool of the all-inclusive hotel Solana: the fractious Garvey family; corpulent swingers Donald and Jacqueline; and drip Martin, who has mislaid his wife and arrives instead with a brassy blonde called Brandy (guest star Sheridan Smith) in tow. By now we're used to Benidorm's broad comic brush. The characters don't just argue, they hurl curses at each other. If someone has an out-of-date mobile phone, it's not just a few years old but a big 1980s brick. When a character gets comically sunburnt, it's because he was wearing a silver suit and riding a 12ft-high bicycle. Nothing happens by halves. But although the comic timing is laboured, the re-creation of hellishness can be spot on. The scene where The Oracle (Johnny Vegas) is driven mad by his mum's trivia-quiz ignorance is inspired, and Geoffrey Hutchings' scooter mogul Mel is superbly awful.

tvBite has always found Sheridan Smith much warmer and funnier doing interviews for any of her low-rent shows (Royle Family apart) than she actually is on screen. So it's a mixed blessing to see her parachuted in to the first ep of the third series of ITV's flagship (only) sitcom. She donates a wiggle and a rasping scouse accent to the hour-long special, which adheres to the sitcom formula in its strictest sense. It's very much a series of set pieces linked by location. Some of the set pieces make you want to crush the writers' knuckles with a hammer (an out-of-control toy hovercraft chasing a Spanish waiter); while others are undeniably amusing (Johnny Vegas's character getting irritated by the stupid crossword answers). The good moments (mainly coming from the impressive cast) make you realise that there's something in there that makes it all worthwhile.

Benidorm tourism chiefs fight back

Johnny Vegas and his co-stars from the hit ITV comedy Benidorm have put the resort on the map for all the wrong reasons, showing it to be the home of the package holiday from hell.

Johnny Vegas on 'Ideal'

Much to his surprise, English comedian Johnny Vegas says his real life has been playing out like an episode of HBO's crime drama The Wire.

If they conducted a national poll to find which panel show the public thought best bridged the gap between Have I Got News For You and Family Fortunes, this would be the hands-down winner.

Host Jimmy Carr returns to deadpan his way through an eighth series of more current affair-based quipping.

The show's traditional opening round to try and guess which headlines have been exercising the public jawbones this week should be pretty easy. And you can bet team captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford have spent the week happily polishing ad-libbed one-liners about Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle's meltdown, The Apprentice and the Big Brother launch.

As with HIGNFY, the only flaw in this format is that the panelists then have to patiently EXPLAIN these hot topics to us as though we've just recently touched down from Mars. "She was this woman with bushy eyebrows who lived with her cat in a village in Scotland and then she became the most famous woman in the world and it all went a bit wrong..."

Chipping in with their two-pence worth this week will be Johnny Vegas, Ulrika Jonsson, Jodie Kidd (not known for her rapid-fire humour, but she may surprise us) and Jack Whitehall, who'll be secretly hoping that the nation will be talking of nothing other than what a shame it is he won't be hosting Big Brother's Big Mouth this year.

New series of the topical quiz show - that's so hot C4 would only send us a preview disc to get here on Monday. Presumably because it is so topical it is filmed after it's shown. It's funnier than it has any real right to be, because of Jimmy Carr's well crafted one-liners, Jason Manford's likeable nature and Sean Lock's occasional bursts of genius. The guests tonight are the posh 12-year-old comic Jack Whitehall, who did a nice line in flirting with Ken Livingstone last time he was on and Johnny Vegas, who we saw trawling around a north London bookshop last week looking rather svelte.

It's not the most sophisticated of sitcoms, but this character-based ensemble job surprised many by walking off with last year's National TV Award for Best Comedy. Here the regular cast, including Johnny Vegas and Abigail Cruttenden, return for an hour-long one-off, picking up where series two concluded.

Very nearly as funny as Eldorado, this bubbly, award-winning sitcom about Brits abroad is back for a one-off special. What's more, a third series - in this fresh, hour-long format - has laid down a Union Jack towel in the Spanish resort ready for it's arrival in September. Tonight, though, we pick up where the second series left off, with Mel unconscious after being drop-kicked by Johnny Vegas, Mick in the hands of the local plod, Madge hysterical and Kate pregnant... Farcical fun in the sun.