Nigel Havers

Steven Toast as James Bond? Why not? He's only got Michael Fassbender and Nigel Havers for competition, after all. This audition, like so many others, sees Matt Berry's titular luvvie misjudging the mood somewhat. But there are even greater problems in store when a poker game with Andrew Lloyd Webber turns nasty. With Webber's universally feared enforcer Michael Ball (played here by Michael Ball) on his tail and a gay porn voiceover to complete, Toast's on his uppers.

Still, there's always some way that things can get worse... This first series comes to an end with lots of blood and finally, a glimpse of Toast's terrible play. By and large, it's been a delight: a tour de force of virtuosic vocal and physical comedy and the kind of relentless, off-the-cuff daftness that can only be the result of meticulous planning and dedication. Encore!

Despite the fact he's achieved panel show ubiquity over the last few years, there was until recently a nagging sense that Jack Whitehall's privileged upbringing - the Harrodian School, Nigel Havers as a godfather - rendered him too smug to offer real comic depth. But his 2011 Edinburgh shows were unexpectedly funny and poignant, and he brilliantly nailed the role of posh twerp JP in the recent Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat. Here he returns to Hammersmith, where he sold out two dates last year, to guest-host the last in the present series of Live at the Apollo. Josh Widdicombe and Shappi Khorsandi are the other genial stand-ups on the bill.

There are times when you wonder if this show wouldn't work just as well as a head-to-head between David Mitchell and Lee Mack - everyone else is making up the numbers really, and they know it. You can imagine a programme where the two of them simply sat there and mocked each other's different worlds, and a very funny show it would be.

But probably not as funny as this is, because it's often the rogue elements that make it - such as Nigel Havers this week claiming he once went out with a flamenco dancer who turned out to be a man. Mack's flights of fancy as he interrogates that story are inspired, as is Mitchell's cross-examination of Charlie Brooker's far-fetched Valentine's Day anecdote. I mean, what kind of teenager was he?

The so-so sitcom revolving around the slacker employees of a personal injury law firm concludes with the company's 30th anniversary. There's not much to celebrate: business is bad for Mike (Nigel Havers) and he's also lost his wife. Meanwhile, the gossiping monkeys make a bad impression when the daughter of Mike's silent partner pays an unexpected visit and decides changes are needed.

A quick chat with Nigel Havers

Nigel Havers tells us why he'd love to do a costume drama, hanging out with Mick Jagger, and his return to comedy in BBC3's Lunch Monkeys.

The comedy set in the postroom of a "no-win, no-fee" law firm, and starring Nigel Havers as a long-suffering boss, returns for a second series. Havers' character spends his days despairing of his inept employees - or would do if he wasn't permanently distracted by the shenanigans of his PA, who's determined to sleep her way to the top. Down in the basement, his underlings flirt and fight, while unsorted mail stacks up around them. They're an amusing if not exactly side-splitting bunch: highly strung Tania; wannabe artist Kenny; workshy Darrel, still hopelessly in love with a still unimpressed Shelley; and dopey Asif, who has neglected to tell his parents that he's a postman, not a hotshot lawyer. In tonight's episode, newly promoted Tania seems destined to fail her first appraisal and Darrel tries to persuade Shelley that he would be the perfect flatmate.

Lunch Monkeys had the grey pallor of Wardle's charred grayling, a dull sitcom in which Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps entered into an unhappy marriage with a sub-standard retread of The Office. It centred on the workers of an office postroom. There was a bitchy office manager, thick lads who are quite endearing, a blonde, female good-hearted object of lust, a slimy, mucky solicitor, all of whom said exactly the crass jokes you'd expect from them. Nigel Havers looked understandably depressed as the office head honcho. One for the shredder.

Lunch Monkeys is a dog's dinner

Even Nigel Havers can't save BBC3's new show. But a bad comedy on the youth channel shouldn't come as a surprise.

Has the world had a collective loss of short-term memory or did The Office never happen? If it hadn't then the clowns on Lunch Monkeys might just about have got away with it. But it did and they don't. Xeroxing Ricky Gervais's face and sticking it on my plasma screen would have been quicker and funnier.

I'll be brief because it makes me weary just thinking about it but the set-up is this: it's a comedy in an office. It's full of people who are either bored or stupid. Actually they're mostly bored and stupid. There's an Asian idiot called Asif, an English slapper called Tania and a lovelorn, long-haired streak of photocopy paper called Kenny, thus ensuring a generous range of gender and ethnic groups are duly insulted.

Somewhere hiding in the back office, praying he doesn't get many lines, sniffing his Chariots Of Fire shorts and wondering how, how, how did it come to this is Nigel Havers and it's here that Lunch Monkeys achieves the impossible: it makes you feel sorry for Nigel Havers. How did he wind up as the boss of a personal injury law firm in a sitcom which constitutes a crime against comedy? His hair is still lovely and floppy and everything.

Hang on. A new, work-set comedy with staff playing pranks on each other, a spineless boss and scenes divided by printers in action? But this isn't Wernham Hogg; this is personal law injury firm Fox Cranford. And the approach is totally different: it's overplayed and apparently aimed at the Two Pints demographic. The opener is a classic set-up, with new girl Shelley (Rachel Rae) arriving late on her first day and making a disastrous impression with her superiors. Nigel Havers adds a veneer of class, but it's all forehead-slappingly obvious.