Pete Naughton

Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) and the rest of the crew from his working-class Manchester estate return for an eighth series of Channel 4's increasingly tired-looking drama Shameless tonight, with an opening plotline in which a raucous stag do somehow leads to a psychedelic alien abduction (don't ask). Four episodes follow on consecutive nights this week, before the series settles back into its regular Tuesday night slot next week.

If a British sitcom gets better-than-average ratings, wins a couple of awards and isn't too downright weird to get lost in translation, it's not unusual for an American TV network to approach its creators with a mind to a Stateside remake. Probably the best known example of this is the American version of The Office, now in its seventh season, but the practice has been going on since at least the 1970s, when Steptoe and Son, rather surreally, was remade in Los Angeles as Sanford and Son.

What's little discussed, though, is how a behind-the-scenes collaboration between cynical British writers and hard-nosed US executives plays out - which is where this new sitcom, written by David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You), comes in.

It stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig as a British husband-and-wife team who produce a successful show called Lyman's Boys, which is duly scooped up by a US network. They jet out to California and start working with their new colleagues, all of whom seem intent on stamping out any hint of fusty Britishness, starting with the show's corpulent lead, Julian (Richard Griffiths), whom they decide to replace with the wonderfully unsuitable Matt LeBlanc (Joey from Friends). The first episode is high on plot development and low on gags, but the series does improve and is worth sticking with.

It's more than a quarter of a century since Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise's double act was stopped in its tracks by Morecambe's untimely death - which, in the world of showbiz, is certainly enough time to be forgotten, usurped or found to be desperately unfashionable by a new generation of viewers and performers. But the pair retain enough comic sparkle to put most of their successors in the shade.

Eric and Ernie is a biopic that follows the pair from their beginnings on Jack Hylton's youth theatre circuit up until the brink of TV success in the 1950s. Written by Peter Bowker, and starring Bryan Dick as Ernie Wise, Daniel Rigby as Eric Morecambe and Victoria Wood as Morecambe's ambitious, plain-talking mother Sadie, it's a wonderful piece of drama: warm-hearted, clever, beautifully acted and funny enough to make your cheeks ache.

It's hard not to like Ashley Jensen, the Scottish actress who was catapulted to fame when she played Ricky Gervais's accident-prone best friend Maggie in Extras. Blessed with an open face, a slightly awkward manner and a wry sense of humour - much like Martin Freeman, her male equivalent in The Office, in fact - she's fast become a popular hit with audiences and a shoo-in for TV producers looking to cast a sympathetic female lead. So it may come as a surprise to viewers of this sitcom pilot episode to find her playing a high-powered ad executive called Erin, who has a penchant for shouting things like, "Unless the answer is yes, I don't want to know!" Glimmers of vulnerability appear, though, as she finds her boyfriend Mike (Raza Jaffrey) in bed with another woman and goes on a vengeful spending spree with his money - buying, among other things, a dilapidated farm which, in a moment of blind inspiration, she decides to actually take on. And so Erin arrives in Yorkshire to meet Olive (Jean Heywood), her cantankerous sitting tenant; Clive (Michael Hodgson), the ale-soaked local handyman; Judith (Sylvestra Le Touzel), her horsey neighbour; and a cast of other bucolic types. The result is a sitcom that, given a bit of spit and polish and a generous BBC One budget, might just inherit The Vicar of Dibley's mud-flecked crown.

After tonight's penultimate episode, devotees will have watched two and a half hours of the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing lightly fictionalised versions of their real selves as they joke their way around an uneventful culinary tour of the North. This may sound like TV's answer to a large dose of Tuinal, but somehow the two men have managed to create something that's genuinely funny. Tonight's instalment takes them to the Yorke Arms, Harrogate, and contains one of the most surreal Woody Allen impersonations you're ever likely to hear.

The BBC's successful Grumpy Old franchise - in which various aged or ageing TV pundits are encouraged to grouse on about a given topic - rolls on with this new programme focusing on the supposedly cheerful experience of mandatory education. Expect wry classroom anecdotage from the likes of Al Murray, Shappi Khorsandi, Ronni Ancona and Mark Radcliffe.

The BBC's successful Grumpy Old franchise - in which various aged or ageing TV pundits are encouraged to grouse on about a given topic - rolls on with this new programme focusing on the supposedly cheerful experience of mandatory education. Expect wry classroom anecdotage from the likes of Al Murray, Shappi Khorsandi, Ronni Ancona and Mark Radcliffe.

The BBC's latest experiment in light, family-friendly entertainment draws to a close tonight with this final episode of John Bishop's Britain, an occasionally funny show in which the Liverpudlian stand-up riffs on a given weekly theme - families, love and marriage, etc - with additional padding from celebrity guests, vox pop interviews with members of the public and short comedy sketches. Tonight's theme is holidays, which gives the charismatic Bishop the chance to air some decent material about his experiences venturing abroad with young children, interspersed with some considerably less amusing chitchat from the likes of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

It would make an interesting study to count how many times the BBC has used the once-fashionable word "edgy" to describe a comedy programme in the 18 months since the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand "Sachsgate" row touched ground. My bet is that you'd be able to count the instances on one hand. Instead, the Corporation has taken to producing industrial volumes of feel-good, night-out-with-your-mates-style comedy. This new bright and breezy entertainment show, hosted by Liverpudlian stand-up John Bishop, is a case in point. Bishop takes on a different theme in each of the series's six episodes - family, growing up, holidays, etc - and gives it a stand-up treatment, interspersed with contributions from celebrity guests, cheaply produced sketches and interviews with the general public. Puzzlingly, no specific information about tonight's first episode was available at the time of going to press, but I was able to watch a taster DVD for the series in which Bishop discussed the pros and cons of love and marriage in front of a studio audience. It was funny, in an easy, unchallenging sort of a way - and about as edgy as a Victoria sponge.

There was a time, a few years ago, when it seemed that we would never see or hear the end of Russell Brand: TV channels, radio schedules and newspapers jostled with his loud-mouthed, risqué and occasionally funny presence on a near-daily basis. But then, in October 2008, the "Sachsgate" scandal hit and his broadcasting career on this side of the pond more or less dried up. This energetically confrontational stand-up show, recorded last year in London, marks a return of sorts to British TV, with topics including his disastrous hosting of the MTV Video Awards, his film career and the media scrum that engulfed him during "Sachsgate".