Lee Mack

The BBC was set to axe Lee Mack's old-style sitcom earlier this year but a public outcry changed all that. So here it is returning for a fourth series with slacker Lee (Mack) still desperate to win the approval of his flatmate Lucy (Sally Bretton) who, despite succumbing to a Christmas kiss last time we saw the pair together, is back to being as unattainable as ever.

Lee Mack's flatmates sitcom, where characters stay in to strangle funny lines with their old-fashioned delivery, returns for a fourth series. Not Going Out can, however, take pride in its inoffensive plotting, and its smart, well-constructed gags. This week, Tim goes clubbing, but getting tired at the end of the night he heads to Lee's wearing a double-breasted, fawn trench coat, which he thought was his but, as it emerges, isn't. He knows this because there are drugs in the pocket. And Tim would never keep drugs in a coat - especially not this kind (white, powdered, illegal) and quantity (lots).

Last year it looked like curtains for Lee Mack and Tim Vine's brightly lit one-liner-thon. But lo, it's back - and a jolly good thing too, for this flatmates sitcom is a cheesy guilty pleasure. In this opener, staid old Tim goes clubbing, which of course leads to disaster - he returns to Lee's wearing the wrong coat, which happens to be full of drugs.

This Lee Mack sitcom is like ITV1's Primeval. Not because it features time travel and dinosaurs, at least not in tonight's episode, but because, like that show, it was thought to be dead and buried. Instead, I'm pleased to say, it's back for another series, kicking off with a story where Lee has accidentally walked off with a drug dealer's coat.

As team captain on Would I Lie To You?, as well his mega stand-up career and numerous other TV appearances, Lee Mack must have a bottomless well of gags in his back yard - and those jokes just keep on coming.

Now with a Rose D'Or and a Royal Television Award under its scruffy belt, his happy-go-lucky sitcom returns for series four and a six-week run.

In tonight's episode the scruffy belt in question belongs to an oversized trench coat that Lee's best mate Tim (Tim Vine) has mistakenly picked up from a ­nightclub cloakroom.

"You look like two dwarves with one cinema ticket," Lee tells Tim. ­Unfortunately, the coat isn't his, and neither is the large plastic bag full of cocaine that Tim finds stashed in the pocket.

How to return the drugs to their rightful owner before he comes looking for them is another unlikely problem for the hapless pair - as well as for Tim's ditzy girfriend Daisy (Katy Wix).

It's also the set-up for more of the kind of class A one-liners that make this half hour absolutely whizz past each week.

Lee Mack interview

BBC sitcom Not Going Out is back on our screens later this week, but it's not been an easy journey!

Lee Mack interview

Did the decision to axe Not Going Out hit Lee Mack hard? He said: "To a degree... you need quite a lot of time with sitcom to bed it in and I felt we were just about getting there."

The set is bedecked with ivy and gargolyles; Stephen Fry has a fez on; his four guests are wearing hooded capes. It's all because tonight, H is for hocus-pocus, a magic-themed Christmas special with the most famous wizard of them all, Daniel Radcliffe, joining the ranks of naughty pupils trying to second guess Professor Fry's fascinating facts. The show nearly comes off the rails when Lee Mack, on brilliant form, has a spelling-related set-to with the host. "Are you incapable of rational thought?" wails Fry, "You can't be that stupid!" Mack's punishment is to end the show sawn in half by Alan Davies (Radcliffe suffers worse), but before then we discover what the word "muggle" originally meant, and hear an intriguing theory about cracker jokes.

Lee Mack is the host, which means he's going "to throw as many jokes at you as possible and hope some of them work". A few do. But prefacing a gag with the revelation that not many audiences have laughed at it just isn't conducive to side-splitting laughter. He's joined by Rich Hall, the grouchy, sardonic American comedian who looks uncannily like Moe from The Simpsons and who has a penchant for political observations: for instance, he left the country with Gordon Brown in charge and when he returned it was "being led by two gay antiques dealers". Last on stage is Danny Bhoy, who's half-Scottish and half-Indian: "So unlike most Scots I don't get sunburnt from watching fireworks." Scottish humour, along with a skit about the connection between club music and cats being sick, forms the basis of his act. So something for everyone.

Portrait of the artist: Lee Mack, comedian

'Since The Office, people think that comedy is only good if it reflects the way that people really speak. Nonsense'