Nico Tatarowicz

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As for the lookalikes the faces look about as spot on as you can get. It is no surprise that the programme starts with a disclaimer making it clear that these are fakes and that this is a comedy.

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Murder in Successville is back on our screens next week, with a third series once more bringing Tom Davis back as uncompromising cop DI Sleet, alongside a whole new roster of celebrity rookie-cops to help him solve a crime. But is the third series up to the high standards set by the two before it? Our editor Paul Holmes took a sneaky peek to find out...

Space Ark pilot commissioned

Channel 4 has commissioned a non-broadcast pilot of Space Ark, a sci-fi sitcom starring Justin Edwards and Nico Tatarowicz (former Mongrels writer).

Sitting down and listening to someone read you a story. How long is it since you did that? Not since you were a kid, I'll bet. But that's what Crackanory, the belated grown-up follow-up to children's favourite Jackanory, is asking us to do.

It seems an oddly perverse choice of revival in this age of multitasking, e-readers and texting while you're eating your dinner and listening to your iPod all at the same time. Slowing right down and listening to someone else talk at you: that requires you chill that pulse rate right down.

But it's worth the effort. The opening double bill of slightly twisted short stories repaid giving them your proper attention. As Jack Dee told topical tale Bitter Tweet, a barbed attack on social media manipulation that featuring a hapless bloke called 'Dazpants80' crossing tweets with singing fringe Joaquin Blieber, it was simply impossible not to be pulled into this sharply drawn world.

True, there were some concessions to a modern audience; it wasn't just Dee sat in an armchair. There were some simple dramatised sequences - Dazpants80 finding himself a prisoner in his pub - and a few animated distractions to soften the blow of simply listening.

But for the most part, this was Dee as storyteller, delivering the lines of writer Nico Tatarowicz. It felt like a comforting throwback to a simpler age, which was rather odd, given the subject matter.

The second story, Toby Davies's What Peebee Did Next, told with a knowing tongue in her cheek by Sally Phillips, was more of a throwback to the old Jackanory, albeit with a gruesome sense of humour.

The story of a toymaker who left his happy family an unusual bequest, it had the ring of a Grimm fairy tale, a moral homily popping up to save the day at the 11th hour. At least I felt like I'd had a beginning, middle and end. Some five-season dramas don't deliver that.

On paper this is a bit odd. Using the format of kids' favourite Jackanory to tell grown-up stories feels like a futile exercise. In reality it scores more hits than misses. This is partly down to the choice of storytellers: Jack Dee is the perfect voice of Nico Tatarowicz's modern-morality tale about the perils of social media, featuring Sightseers star Steve Oram as a Twitter-obsessive; while Sally Phillips's twee delivery adds an edge to Toby Davies's macabre story of a toymaker made into an automaton after his death. Both writers have worked on big comedy sketch shows (That Mitchell and Webb Look, Armstrong and Miller) so each story is darkly funny and neatly crafted. Get sitting comfortably.

A nice idea, this, as Dave continues its understandably low-budget move into original programming. Split into two halves, Crackanory offers fairytales for adults.

First, Jack Dee reads Nico Tatarowicz's gloomy Twitter parable Bitter Tweet in which a smug urbanite finds himself at the centre of a social media storm after casually insulting a Justin Bieber-style pop phenomenon. And then Sally Phillips narrates Toby Davis's What Pee Bee Did Next, a more uplifting - if slightly macabre - affair in which an eccentric toymaker attempts to look after his family after his death.

Clearly, the quality will vary over the series but there's something deeply, atavistically satisfying about being read to and something pleasingly minimal about these two tales and the very basic mode of their rendering. Worth a look.