Nigel Planer

This sitcom about a sitcom, starring Matt LeBlanc, Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig, has never quite lived up to its sizzling potential. However, series two does end on a high: the marriage of big cheese Merc comes under fire from all corners as he gears up for the Man Of The Year event. Plus Nigel Planer pops up as LeBlanc's lawyer - a union that promises a rich seam of comedy if he stays for series three.

The dark and shameless whirligig of Episodes spins to an end tonight, complete with fighting, kissing, swearing and Sean (Stephen Mangan) doing "his Wallace and Gromit smile".

Strangely, given its title, Episodes is really about a plot arc that spans the series. In the first, it all built to Beverly's betrayal with Matt LeBlanc; this time round the focus is on brilliantly amoral Merc (half exec, half fuming troll) and his web of infidelities. He's overcome cancer, bereavement and losing the talking dog show. Now his job and marriage are under siege. Look out for a note-perfect cameo from Nigel Planer. Bring him back for series three!

Tonight's finale of this soft satire about the making of a US TV series scurries to tie up loose ends and deliver an emotional punch. As with previous episodes, it's a qualified success that doesn't quite manage to seize its comic chances. There's schmaltz: even Matt LeBlanc's character, hitherto the show's most reliably unsentimental, gives a soppy speech. Having said that, the longueurs of plot are regularly buoyed by great zingers: Episodes' strength is in causing sharp intakes of breath when characters say the unsayable. For example, slimy studio boss Merc believes his sightless wife can actually see the odd shape: "And she calls herself blind?" retorts Merc's lover. "What a b---h!" An amusing climactic scene sees fisticuffs at an awards show, and Nigel Planer delivers a wonderful cameo as LeBlanc's lawyer. At the centre of the maelstrom are Beverly and Sean (played faultlessly by Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) as the Brits trying to make sense of the amoral milieu and deciding whether to reunite. Episodes hasn't hit the heights of other shows-within-a-show such as The Larry Sanders Show and Extras, but its swipes at Tinseltown score often enough to please.

It didn't take long for the first phone hacking comedy to make it to our screens. This hour-long swipe at the tabloid scandal, written by Guy Jenkin of Drop the Dead Donkey fame, is set at The Daily Comet, where staff land stories by any means necessary. Phone hacking, entrapment, blagging... the hacks here do it all. Press baron Stanhope Feast (Michael Kitchen, playing a gruff Antipodean magnate with a young Asian wife) demands some big exclusives from his flame-haired editor Kate Loy (Claire Foy). But her moral compass went awry some time ago and it's about to cause a major scandal. The salty script is peppered with political references, while a colourful cast includes Nigel Planer and Celia Imrie.

For the first time in six years, The Comic Strip, the comedy which was broadcast on Channel 4's opening night, returns with a film noir spoof on former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Stephen Mangan played the PM, who finds himself on the run from Inspector Hutton (Robbie Coltrane), who arrests him for a murder Blair claims he didn't commit. During his attempt to escape the law he pushes an Old Labour tramp off a train (Ross Noble), kills a spookily accurate predictor of the future (Rik Mayall) and ends up in bed with Baroness Thatcher (Jennifer Saunders).

This episode features some great performances, from Mangan as Blair, Saunders as Thatcher, Harry Enfield as an "f-word" fuelled Alistair Campbell (still think Malcolm Tucker is the better, ruder and funnier spin doctor), and Nigel Planer's spooky reincarnation of Peter Mandelson. There were plenty of laughs to be had, especially if you're a film noir fan; for example, Rik Mayall's Professor Predictor is a clear parody of Mr. Memory from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

There were also actual moments of tension. My favourite bit in the episode featured Blair in Thatcher's mansion, preparing to change for dinner and being told by the butler Tebbit (John Sessions) not to look in a cupboard. Blair obviously does and out of it pops the rotting skeleton body of Dennis Thatcher.

If I were to have any complaints about this programme, it would be that Tony Blair doesn't seem to be that much of a current satirical subject to mock. Not only is Blair no longer Prime Minister, he wasn't even our last Prime Minister. We've had two different people in the position since he's left. If this was made while Blair was still in power it would have had a much bigger impact.

We see so little of The Comic Strip ensemble these days that it's easy to forget how long they've been in the trenches of British spoof, tossing out a grenade every now and then, as if cursed to spend the rest of their days striving to match the perfection of their hilarious first episode, "Five Go Mad in Dorset", which introduced high jinks to Channel 4's inaugural broadcast in 1982 and the term "lashings of ginger beer" to the cultural memory.

"The Hunt for Tony Blair" - a parodic splicing of noughties politics and 1950s British film noir (though what Herman's Hermits were doing on the soundtrack I don't know) - wasn't uproariously funny but it was handsomely made, with melodramatic shadows and enough money for fog, flat-footed policemen and steam trains. The plot, such as it was - a madcap chase across country, with the PM on the run for murder - threw up knockabout humour and vignettes from Blair's WMD fiasco, featuring a cast of the usual suspects: a languid Nigel Planer as Mandelson; Harry Enfield in East End shout mode as "Alastair"; the excellent Jennifer Saunders as Thatcher in her dotage (and full Barbara Cartland drag), watching footage of her Falklands triumphs from a chaise longue.

Director Peter Richardson, whose comic talents aren't seen enough on screen, played George Bush as a rasping B-movie Italian mobster ("I'm gonna get straight to the crotch of the matter here"). With the exception of impressionist Ronni Ancona (whose 10 seconds as Barbara Windsor seemed puzzlingly extraneous), no one went for a direct impersonation. Stephen Mangan didn't make a bad Blair, though he could have worked on the grin, and he couldn't quite make his mind up between feckless and reckless as he capered from one mishap to the next leaving a trail of bodies. Did Blair's moral insouciance ("Yet another unavoidable death, but, hey, shit happens") call for a look of idiocy or slipperiness?

The comedy had mischief at its heart in mooting that Blair had bumped off his predecessor, John Smith, and accidentally pushed Robin Cook off a Scottish mountain, while Robbie Coltrane's Inspector Hutton (aha!) tacitly invoked the spectre of Dr David Kelly (we never found out who Blair was charged with murdering). But it was hard to squeeze fresh satire from the overfamiliar stodge of the politics ("Tell Gordon to run the country and trust the bankers"). Mangan was at his funniest hiding among sheep in the back of a truck or kicking Ross Noble (playing an old socialist) off a speeding train, though there was amusement elsewhere. I had to laugh at variety theatre act Professor Predictor, shoehorned into the story to enable Rik Mayall in a bald wig and boffin glasses to answer questions from the audience. Would the Beatles still be at No 1 in 50 years' time?

"No. The Beatles will no longer exist. But Paul McCartney will marry a woman with one leg."

How the audience roared. "Pull the other one," someone shouted. Arf, arf.

Biting political satire has never really been The Comic Strip's main selling point.

But films such as a "A Fistful Of Travellers' Cheques" or "Five Go Mad In Dorset", which took the mickey out of spaghetti westerns and Enid Blyton novels, proved that you don't always need a big target to score a cracking comedy bullseye.

Their latest effort - the first for six years - is a peculiar, stylish mishmash that re-imagines the Iraq Inquiry as a black and white film noir. ­Unfortunately, not all of it works, perhaps because their confusing vision of the 1960s contains songs from both The Beatles and Duran Duran.

That said, Stephen Mangan - of Green Wing and Alan Partridge fame - makes a surprisingly plausible stand-in for the former, guitar-strumming Prime Minister who, very much like Corrie's John Stape, becomes an almost accidental serial killer.

As the bodies pile up, he's pursued by a pair of policemen played by Robbie Coltrane and The ­Inbetweeners' James Buckley, all the while ­maintaining an air of innocence.

There's no appearances from ­stalwarts such as Dawn French or Adrian Edmondson this time around, but Jennifer Saunders pops in with another take on Margaret Thatcher.

We also have Rik Mayall playing a music-hall psychic who makes uncanny predictions about weapons of mass destruction, Peter Richardson, who also directs, pops up as George Bush in gangster mode, and Nigel Planer simply IS Peter Mandelson.

The joke seems to be not how much the actors look like the people they're supposed to be playing, rather how much they don't.

You'd never guess in a million years that John Sessions is supposed to be Norman Tebbit, for instance.

Good to see some of The Comic Strip gang (Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer) return after a six-year break. They're joined by Stephen Mangan and Inbetweener James Buckley for a cunningly conceived film noir romp featuring Tony Blair as a murderer on the run. Mangan is well-cast as Blair, constantly trying to justify his actions (he's an innocent man, really), while Buckley teams up with Robbie Coltrane's Inspector Hutton in a bid to chase him down.

The Comic Strip have been away too long (six years), and while they've been gone young pretenders (like Star Stories) have moved in on their patch. But for anyone who grew up with their early films, there's a thrill in seeing comedy heroes like Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer and Jennifer Saunders back in the same cast, even if they're barely sharing screen time.

Instead, they all share scenes with Stephen Mangan, who proves perfect casting as Tony Blair in a loose plot - a string of film noir pastiches, basically - about the police (in the form of Robbie Coltrane) pursuing him for various murders. The running gag is that Blair keeps killing people and justifying it to himself as, though regrettable, the right decision at the time.

It's sketchy, in both senses, but Mangan holds it together, channelling Blair as a guitar-strumming twit. Saunders does a great Sunset Boulevard Margaret Thatcher and amazingly, Planer's Peter Mandelson is spot on.

The Hunt For Tony Blair & The Best Comic Strip Episodes

The Comic Strip returns at 9pm on Channel 4 this evening with a stellar cast including Robbie Coltrane and Nigel Planer, but can it live up to these five classic episodes that changed the format of British Comedy?