Michael Deacon (I)

Terry-Thomas is as splendid as ever in this cheery award-winning comedy set in the early days of air travel. A big reward is on offer to the winner of an air race from London to Paris; Terry-Thomas's dastardly Sir Percival Ware-Armitage is among the pilots trying to prove they are "number one in the air".

Funny Business, BBC Two, review

Michael McIntyre: £40,000. Ricky Gervais: £25,000. Jason Manford: £25,000. Jo Brand: £10,000-£25,000. Barry Cryer - who after that lot looks an absolute steal - is £2,000-£5,000. This, according to Funny Business, is what it costs to hire the above to tell some jokes at a corporate event.

Why Miranda is now bigger than EastEnders

Miranda Hart's sitcom has huge appeal because of its childlike innocence - and essential niceness.

Miranda, BBC One, review

Perhaps I'm just getting old. I'm sure I'd have loved this show when I was six.

In her at once frothy and bleak episode of Little Crackers - a Sky1 strand of short autobiographical dramas directed by a different star each night - Joanna Lumley sought to persuade us that as a teenage model she had been a) gawky and shy, and b) routinely called ugly by photographers.

These two ideas may sound no more believable than wrestling, but in interviews she's insisted they're true. Apparently in the Sixties all female models were taunted by the men taking their picture. "Close those legs," sneered the photographer in Lumley's short, "I know you're not used to it."

In those days, fashion photographer was the ideal job for a misogynist, allowing him simultaneously to ogle and bully women without fear of reprisal. In Lumley's short, though, there was reprisal, in the form of a magazine editor who fired the photographer after he bullied the teenage heroine. The editor was played by Lumley. Effectively she'd arrived from the future to save herself.

Starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and Jon Hamm (Mad Men), A Young Doctor's Notebook is a new series on Sky Arts 1 based on short stories by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. Set mostly in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, it follows the misadventures of a doctor whose first practice is in the remotest possible countryside. It's principally a comedy, although, as Russian comedy is near-indistinguishable from Russian tragedy (all pain, poverty, disaster and death), the label is perhaps superfluous. Let's just call it Russian.

Hamm was the doctor's older self, who keeps turning up from the future to give his younger self advice. As the other actors were British, and spoke in their normal voices, Hamm had to fit in, leaving him in the unusual position of being an American playing a Russian speaking like an Englishman. Or at least, an American actor's idea of the way an Englishman speaks, i.e., somewhere between Jeremy Irons and a supercilious ghost.

Radcliffe, beady eyes cutely twinkling, was the doctor's younger self. Even at 23 he looks 13, making him well suited to the role, as his character is routinely derided for his youthfulness. Anyway, he was good, which was a relief. I'd hate to have to say he was bad. It would make me feel horribly guilty, as if I'd trodden on a hamster's paw.

The action was a peculiar mix of silliness and gore, but there were some good lines.
Radcliffe (to Hamm, who's waving a scary surgical tool): "Careful, you could have an eye out."

Rowan Atkinson stars in new Blackadder bankers sketch

The first new Blackadder material in a decade was performed last night at the Royal Albert Hall in front of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, with Sir Edmund Blackadder now chief executive of a bailed-out bank.

We Are Most Amused, Royal Albert Hall, London, review

The first new Blackadder material in over a decade was the centrepiece of We Are Not Amused, an agreeable evening of comedy at the Royal Albert Hall, writes Michael Deacon.

Peep Show, Channel 4, preview

If you've never watched this warped, 21st-century answer to The Likely Lads (and there's a reasonable chance you haven't: its biggest audience yet is just 1.8 million), you may be wondering how a comedy that sounds so uncomical can have survived so long - indeed, flourished, winning Baftas, British Comedy Awards, Royal Television Society Awards and the Rose d'Or.

Harry & Paul, BBC Two, review

In some quarters BBC comedy gets derided for being too PC, but you couldn't say that about Harry & Paul, with its officious immigrant traffic warden and its class stereotypes (half the characters are either thick toffs or tracksuited thugs).