Peter Serafinowicz

Can tweeting make comedians wittier?

The 140-character limit on Twitter allows comedy writers like Peter Serafinowicz and Graham Linehan to hone their skills.

This week the pop quiz is the launch pad for the manic wit of regular team captains Noel Fielding and Phill Jupitus, guest host Alex James and panellists Peter Serafinowicz, Holly Walsh, Newton Faulkner and Jessica Origliasso. That means there's a range of comic styles as divergent as this show's musical tastes usually are from the current Top 40.

Stewart Lee, stand-up comic par excellence and TV partner of Richard Herring, returns to prime-time television with this six-part series of sketches and routines, each week taking a new theme. His first is the "toilet book", by which he means the kind of publication one might keep in a bathroom, rather than a Bathstore catalogue. "For some reason," says Lee, "someone, somewhere, thought history, fiction, poetry and the like weren't enough any more, and so they invented celebrity hardbacks, tragic lives and Dan Brown." That gives Lee an excuse to examine works by Asher D and Paddy McGinty, and to wonder what would happen if Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown got a job where he had to break bad news - melodramatic doesn't exactly cover it. Indeed, Lee's strength often comes from a peculiar sense of tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless righteous anger about his subjects: "What does it say about our culture that the word 'toilet' can be appended to the word 'book'?" he asks. "Toilet seat, yes. Toilet paper, yes. Toilet duck - you can even have toilet duck. But toilet book - surely not?" It's hard not to agree. Simon Munnery is among Lee's impressive line-up of co-stars, while comedian Peter Serafinowicz provides the voice-over.

The Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special was surprisingly good fun, given the fact I disliked the original sketch show when it aired earlier last year. The quality control was definitely higher (although the next-day midnight extended repeat reinserted a lot of grot) and I was glad it didn't just put a festive spin on old sketches. A good 85% of it was new stuff - and I'm still giggling at the intimidating estate agent ('did I arks you?') and the insane job interview ('you passed the test!') Let's hope a second series builds on this upswing in quality.

Peter's BBC2 sketch series was a mite disappointing, but there was not much wrong with this inventive Christmas special. The material in this new special seemed to have sieved out the weaknesses which were allowed into the series.

Smooth-voiced comedy wizard Peter Serafinowicz first cast a spell on us in the excellent and under-appreciated Tomorrow's World spoof Look Around You. But he's more than capable of carrying proceedings on his own, as this festive outing of his immersive sketch show proves. Inept inventor/salesman Brian Butterfield, here hawking his 'Christmas pizza', is a delight as ever, and impressions of Terry Wogan and David Attenborough veer dangerously close to genius.

A festive episode of a wildly underrated sketch show. Peter is a versatile actor and a terrifyingly good mimic, but the left-field TV parodies of his 2007 series were perhaps too weird for mass consumption: this is brighter, faster and straighter. There's the odd regrettably unsubtle lampoon (eg Terry Wogan as a hash fiend), but there's also a successful move into traditional sketches, plus joyously imaginative send-ups of Apple adverts and Planet Earth, and fan favourites such as enormous salesman Brian Butterfield, here hawking his comprehensive Christmas pizza. It's a torrent of kooky silliness, textured by Serafinowicz's powerful and slightly scary screen presence. When he's on form - as he often is here - he looks like a star in waiting.

Apart from a pronounceable surname, Mr Peter has it all, really - a great career as a comic actor, writer, composer and a lovely wife in fellow funny thesp Sarah Alexander off Green Wing and Mutual Friends. Now he's also got a Christmas edition of his own sketch series, and he'll be spoofing TV shows, shopping channels and Hollywood news bulletins and generally larking about. And jolly good for him.

A welcome return for this brilliant, imposing performer, whose debut sketch show was let down by some abstruse material. This time we're promised something more conventional, which - for once - is welcome news.

Some people say this sketch show is massively underrated, some say it's just rubbish, which probably means it falls somewhere in the middle, like the vast majority of sketch comedy. Slightly kooky, Serafinowicz's brand of humour is vulnerable to falling flat on its face for being slightly too out there, but in a world where somebody commissioned the dire The Kevin Bishop Show, I'll take this any day.