Mike Higgins

How many Edwardians does it take to change a light bulb? About eight if Up the Women is anything to go by, though as one of them said: "It's hard to see how this would replace the candle."

Jessica Hynes wrote in this newspaper last week that her three-part sitcom about a group of failed suffragettes was originally intended as a film. It says nothing too complimentary about our priorities that the project ended up as a BBC4 micro-budget three-parter, shot in front of a studio audience in a two-room set.

As it was, the traces of its film script origins were detectable in Hynes's performance as the clever but timid Margaret. She proposed that the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle revitalise itself as the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Request Women's Suffrage. Hynes appeared to be acting in the uplifting, thoughtful movie that you would never have quite got round to seeing at your local arthouse cinema. Oddly, though, she seemed to be surrounded by performances, from Rebecca Front, Vicki Pepperdine et al, that were sketch-show broad.

The script, too, careered between these two registers. Still, the brilliant Pepperdine had some funny false teeth and mugged her way through a quite silly knob gag. That just about got my floating vote.

Vicious: Forget the cast, where are the gags?

Last Monday, ITV launched its evening comedy hour, and even six days later I feel fortunate that I came through the experience.

Review: Black Mirror - Tweet dreams are made of this?

Charlie Brooker's smart sci-fi drama wasn't quite the social-media satire it hoped to be.

The premise of new BBC3 murder-mystery sitcom Dead Boss, co-written by and starring Sharon Horgan, is that Helen Stephens (Horgan) has been wrongly convicted of murdering her employer, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Further conspiring against her are a useless solicitor, her venal sister, a sinister prison governor (Jennifer Saunders, left) and a script that displayed recidivist tendencies to criminal one-liners. Perhaps the series will settle, and the actors take a cue from Bryony Hannah's quirky turn as Helen's pyromaniac cellmate.

Nina Conti, daughter of Tom, had a relationship with Ken Campbell, the underground theatre maverick with eyebrows like cumulonimbi, who was 34 years her senior. As she said in her weird and beguiling memoir-cum-travelogue Nina Conti - A Ventriloquist's Story, Campbell was like "a truffle pig for other people's talents". And for some reason he took one look at Conti - a ringer for Pippa Middleton - and thought, you need to throw your voice through a small, mangy monkey puppet.

Which Conti did, successfully and wittily, for a decade, until Campbell's death in 2008 coincided with a career crisis. Going through their old correspondence, she found a note from Campbell exhorting her to attend the unlikely sounding World Ventriloquists' Convention in Kentucky. She decided to go, and yes, that event is as weird as it sounds: 300 homely-looking "vents" wandering around a grotty motel with garish puppets (aliens, newborn infants) trying to avoid those tricky plosives. (In one extraordinary sequence a fellow attendee demonstrated the art of bifurcation: moving your lips as if saying one thing while actually enunciating something entirely different.)

I don't know Conti's work well, but I liked what I saw from the film - her act seemed to extend naturally from her philosophical doubts about her vocation: at one point her monkey hypnotised its mistress whereupon it lost its voice and was forced to head-butt her back to her senses. But the clips of other performers made you wonder why you don't see more ventriloquism on these shores (it's big in America, apparently): an irresistible mix of vaudeville and metaphysics.

But as her diary-style to-camera pieces revealed, Conti was struggling. At one point she took to her motel bed to start crying on the shoulder of the Campbell puppet. The ventriloquist spilling out her guts to the hard-hearted puppet is a bit of a cliché, but Conti's "conversations" were thoughtful, funny and, in this particular scene, extraordinary. The Campbell puppet suggested bluntly to a teary Conti that her babyish monkey puppet arrived on the due day of a foetus she had aborted. No wonder she admitted she was reading a book called Problems of the Self.

Reviews: A Ventriloquist's Story; Dead Boss

A ventriloquist at a career crossroads lets her dummy show the way - to poignant effect.

Stella is played by Ruth Jones, co-creator of Gavin & Stacey, and this new 10-part comedy drama on Sky 1 doesn't stray too far from the formula of that hit show. In Stella, as before, Jones is endlessly watchable. As 42-year-old Stella struggles alone with her two children (and another in prison) in a Welsh valleys village, there are scenes of wry pathos - at one point, an unhappy Stella tries to fit into her 16-year-old daughter's outfits, with unfortunate results.

The problem, so far anyway, comes in the cast of orbiting characters: Stella's dim ex, the lollipop man who lusts after her, and the libidinous older brother. By comparison with Gavin & Stacey's cutely defined personalities, each seems a bit of a cut-out here. Let's hope nine more one-hour episodes will smooth the rough edges.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle looked at identity. Actually, that's not exactly true. His real subject, as it had been the previous week, and the week before that I'd guess, was stand-up comedy itself. And if self-reflexive-comedy sounds a very long way from a good laugh, Lee, it should be said, is a meta-standup without equal. But his approach can make for a relentlessly self-conscious experience both for him and us.

The puzzling existence of till receipts was deemed "bullet-proof observational comedy", as was the fact, according to Lee, that "that there are no Scottish women". When the word "nook" during another passage drew a titter, Lee's eyes lit up and he swerved into a monologue that teased this slight revelation of prurience in his audience. Lee is undeniably funny - just be careful what you laugh at.

After a shaky start, Twenty Twelve developed over its six episodes into a thoroughbred example of that old comedy nag, the mockumentary. Last week's closing episode was case in point - correctly confident in a commission for a second series, it tied up none of its story lines with "734 days to go" and instead delivered a masterclass in comedy, both technical- and character-driven.

Ian's nemesis here was Tony, an embittered old film-maker determined to scupper the equestrian events planned for Greenwich Park. Tony was beautifully played by Tim McInnerny, but the pleasure, as ever, was the sleight of hand on display: the razor-sharp editing, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it sight gags (Tony thumbing through a script entitled "Nail Me To My Car"), the verbose narration. Let's hope Lord Coe can produce something half as entertaining next summer.

Episodes, BBC2, Monday

It's a comedy about a comedy with precious little comedy - but just maybe, the joke's on us.