Michael Deacon (I)

The Trip - or, as it's now titled, The Trip to Italy - returned on Friday on BBC Two. Essentially it's the same show: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing caricatures of themselves, talk rubbish and swap impressions in restaurants. It's very funny.

Now and again it threatens to turn into a deeper, more mature sort of programme, about Coogan and Brydon's relationships with their families.
Personally I'd rather it didn't. I could easily take half an hour of solid nonsense from them. There's almost no plot, but in the interests of more nonsense I'd accept less.

Inside No. 9 was nowhere near as weird as 60 million people willing two skaters they'd never met to copulate, but it was still simmeringly macabre - as you'd expect, given that it was made by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the team from The League of Gentlemen. It's a series of blackly comic one-offs, a little like Murder Most Horrid. This first episode was about adults at a party playing Sardines - a game that quickly became uncomfortable for more reason than one.

The brilliance of it lay in the structure. For about 29 and a half minutes of the 30, I was thinking, "Where's this going? What's the point?" Then, suddenly, all the action happened in the last 30 seconds - making me want to rewatch immediately to see if there were clues I'd missed. It was horrible. I liked it a lot.

Michael Deacon: on Vic and Bob and their crazy new show

As the credits rolled at the end of House of Fools (Tuesday, BBC Two), I noticed something odd. Very odd. And it's been puzzling me ever since. The programme had a Script Editor.

Last of the Summer Wine: Brilliant flat-capped whimsy

Last of the Summer Wine began 40 years ago and Michael Deacon celebrates the charm of the world's longest-running sitcom.

BBC One's new sitcom, Father Figure, which started on Wednesday, has a disturbing premise. It's about a family, every member of which - including the two small children - has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. It isn't actually mentioned anywhere in the script, nor in the publicity material given to journalists, but it's perfectly clear that that's what's happened. The characters have all undergone some form of devastating trauma. It's the only explanation for the way they behave.

Take the hero, Tom, a father of two. We saw him wrestling his mother on the kitchen floor in a way that made it look as if he was having sex with her. We saw him charging upstairs with one of his sons on his back in an effort to break down a lavatory door. We saw him and his mother taking turns to slam each other's heads against the fridge door. There was no plausible reason given for any of these actions; no one who hadn't suffered acute psychological damage would act like this. Plainly, these poor people were ill, and in urgent need of help. It was profoundly harrowing.
And yet, with shocking callousness, the studio audience was laughing.

I suppose there is a minuscule possibility that the characters haven't had nervous breakdowns, and that the relentless falling over and fighting was merely meant to be slapstick. But it seems unlikely, because for slapstick to work - as it does in, say, Laurel & Hardy and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em - you have to be able to believe what you're seeing. The characters must have a reason for what they're doing; they're sane people who set out with good intentions, but, thanks to a combination of clumsiness, stupidity and bad luck, everything goes disastrously wrong. What happens may be absurd, but it follows a certain logic, one calamity leading to the next. Whereas in Father Figure there's little if any logic. The characters just do irrational, silly, horrible and violent things. That's it.

But the weirdest thing about Father Figure is this. Jason Byrne, who both stars in it and wrote it, is a really good stand-up. He's funny. I'm baffled.

Then again, the similarly crude Mrs Brown's Boys has been a big hit for BBC One, so maybe this will be too, and everyone else in the country will love it, and go on and on about how hilarious it was when the father of two looked as if he was having sex with his mother. In which case I'll be the one having a nervous breakdown.

Tony Hancock had no children, but for decades his descendants have been all around us. Basil Fawlty, Rigsby from Rising Damp, Brian Potter from Phoenix Nights, Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, Alan Partridge - all inherited his genes, or at any rate his character's genes (it isn't easy to be sure of the difference, given that by far his most successful role was as a miserable actor-comedian called Tony Hancock).

It would be absurd to suggest the listed characters are identical - every one of them is a brilliant creation in his own right - but all are irritable, stuffy, pompous, emotionally constipated and prematurely middle-aged; they tut and sneer and grumble and moan, each convinced that Fate has singled him out for mistreatment he doesn't deserve.

All are in some way thwarted, yearning impotently for stardom (Partridge), status (Fawlty, Potter), a beautiful woman (Rigsby, Corrigan). And each, most importantly, exudes an air of pathos. No matter how wretchedly they behave, the viewer can't hate them. They remain somehow heroes, awful heroes, and against our better judgement we're on their side. Just as we were with their father, Hancock.

On Tuesday the great progenitor was the subject of BBC One's occasional series My Hero. Ben Miller, of Armstrong & Miller, was the man paying tribute, rummaging through his life and shaking his head in admiration at old scripts of Hancock's Half Hour. These scripts were written not by Hancock but by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, whom Miller interviewed.

Given Hancock enjoyed vast success while Galton & Simpson were writing for him, and next to none after he'd got rid of them, it might be tempting to wonder whether My Hero should have been about them instead. But if Hancock's Half Hour was the biggest thing on radio and TV, it wasn't just because of the dialogue. Hancock himself - and again I'm not sure whether I mean the character, the man or both - stood for something. He stood for England, the England of the 1950s. Weary, glamourless, frustrated, frayed, but battling grumpily on - that was England, and that was Hancock. Hancock's success came to an end not long after the Fifties had. He killed himself in 1968.

Only when I watched it for a second time did I work out the point of Vicious. Of course: it wasn't a sitcom. It was an elaborate exercise in trolling.

On first viewing I couldn't understand why, in the year 2013, two gay men - Gary Janetti and Mark Ravenhill - would create a comedy about gay men who conform to almost every homophobic stereotype: bitchy, vain, melodramatic, lecherous, rude, sulky. The programme's working title was Vicious Old Queens. It was as if Germaine Greer had created a sitcom called Dykes, about two feminists who hate men, wear dungarees and have no sense of humour.

Then it struck me. Vicious was a wind-up, its aim to enrage bilious homophobes by rubbing their faces in their own prejudices. "There! See!" the bilious homophobes would splutter.

"Homosexuals are every bit as seedy and unpleasant as I thought! God, they make me so angry, I could... Arrrgh! My chest! Call 999! I'm having a heart attack!"

I suppose there is an alternative possibility, namely that Vicious is just a load of hackneyed old rubbish. But I'm sure that can't be it.

Vicious stars Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi (quite a coup for an ITV sitcom) as a pair of bickering hams. In some ways it's very traditional. It's filmed on a single set, with a delirious studio audience, and the script contains only two types of dialogue: set-up and punchline. Almost all the punchlines are putdowns. A character will say his dog is 20 years old. Another character will say at least it's younger than these biscuits of yours. That sort of thing.

Slightly less traditional are the jokes about rape. Middle-aged woman: "I'm so frightened I'm going to be raped!" Gay friend, scornfully: "For God's sake, Violet, nobody wants to rape you!" Middle-aged woman: "What an awful thing to say!"

Vicious was followed at 9.30pm by a quiet, likeable new sitcom called The Job Lot. Set in a job centre, it starred Russell Tovey in the "Tim from The Office" role (ordinary bloke doing a job he hates, surrounded by halfwits). A regular character is a woman who refuses any job going. He suggested one at Upper Crust. "I'm wheat intolerant," she protested, as if the job were not selling the goods but eating them.

Ben Elton's new sitcom's political correctness gone mad

Ben Elton's exhaustingly unfunny new sitcom, The Wright Way, feels like the work of a socialist Richard Littlejohn, says Michael Deacon.

Why can't we laugh at the old jokes any more?

A 'racist' joke in Fawlty Towers has been cut because it might offend. Well, it might - if you didn't get the joke.