Keith Watson

Idris Elba looks a right Charlie in hackneyed comedy

Turn Up Charlie, in which Elba - for some reason beyond easy comprehension - has decided he wants to be the new Three Men And A Baby-era Ted Danson, is decidedly not cool.

Kerry Godliman interview

As Ricky Gervais's new comedy tackles grieving is there anything left we can't laugh about?

Sixty seconds with Jamie Laing

The Made In Chelsea star, 29, talks teddy bear chat shows and getting his kit off in Private Parts Live.

60 seconds with Bill Bailey

The comedian, musician, actor and all-round Renaissance man, 54, on his TV show with Idris Elba, wanting to play a villain, and his love of ancient woodlands.

Review: Back

It's a set-up perfectly designed to milk David Mitchell's speciality - the outraged loser - to the max and it's the scenes where Stephen is, at one point almost literally, swimming in the piss-poor job he's made of his life that give Back its comic class.

Rev review

Rev stars a holy trinity of great British actresses and a brilliant Tom Hollander in the title role.

I never knew how much I missed Spitting Image until I watched Arena: Whatever Happened To Spitting Image (BBC Four). Imagine, 15million people a week used to tune into a bunch of puppets savaging politicians. We actually cared enough about what was going on to do that.

True, puppeteers Peter Fluck and Roger Law and the rest of the Spitting Image team struck satirical gold in the form of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative cabinet but are things really so much better now? Just because we're adrift in the politics of the bland, does that mean they should be spared the comedic water cannon?

My guess is if someone brought back Spitting Image now, it could be an enormous hit. But has anyone got the latex balls to try it? Would they be hit with law suits the minute they went on air? Those questions won't be bothering the creators, who cheerily admitted their programme was the product of angry, youthful loins.

"I don't throw my dinner at the television any more," said Fluck (or it might have been Law). "That's a good sign."

It turned out the only people who survived the high-intensity Spitting Image workload had high energy or were on drugs. Or quite probably both.

Now settled back in middle age, Law (or it might have been Fluck) ruefully recognised that where once they thought they'd change the world, now they knew "it doesn't change anything". However, someone really should be trying.

Sometimes you watch a comedy and think "this is clever, isn't it?" and then you realise that, actually, you're not laughing all that much. So it was with W1A (BBC Two), a sort-of sequel to Olympics spoof Twenty Twelve that switches the satirical spotlight on to the BBC itself.

Look at us, we're the BBC and we can laugh at ourselves, is the subtext as David Tennant's arch voice-over guides us around BBC HQ in a maze of corporate speak, introducing us to a grazing herd of corporate types with a remit to think Big Thoughts and babble nonsense about 'appointment to view' television.

In the middle of it all, doing his dazed labrador thing, returns Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher, this time as the BBC's new Head of Values, which seems to be exactly the same job as Director of Strategic Governance, played with obsequious brilliance by Jason Watkins, a comic actor of impressive versatility.

So far, so potentially side-splitting. Somehow, though, the in-jokery felt a touch too pleased with itself. A scene where Fletcher stumbled in on Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob in the middle of an arm-wrestle bout was telling, a bit like that first day in a new job when someone says: "You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps" and you cringe, thinking: "Get me out of here now."

Let's not sound too harsh: W1A is ingeniously scripted, painting a neat picture of a culture where covering your back is number one in any ambitious individual's skill set. And things really picked up when, belatedly, Jessica Hynes returned as nightmare PR Siobhan Sharpe, a character so deliriously loathsome it really is funny. Whereas seeing a BBC run by bumbling idiots is merely believably bothersome: after all, we're paying for them.

'An anal event' pretty much sums up The Walshes

I'm sure it's meant as an affectionate send-up of Dublin home life but there was an odd lack of subtlety about the crudely drawn characters we were introduced to last night. There was a mad Mammy, an eejit jokester Dad, a simple son, a 'normal' daughter (played by Amy Stephenson) embarrassed by the lot of them - the same characters we've seen in all sitcoms.

Can Moone Boy get any better? This week we were treated to a spot of obscure Irish sporting history as Martin's dad Liam (Peter McDonald) relived his greatest moment of sporting triumph with a grudge golf match against the devious bank manager who'd done him down in the prime of youth. This centred on a handball match, which had nothing to do with the sport that had us transfixed in London 2012 and all to do with a kind of squash played without rackets. It was an excuse to give some of Moone Boy's excellent support cast a turn in the spotlight and they swung it with aplomb.