Peter Serafinowicz

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.

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.

It's totally bonkers, the product of a strange mind. It's also very funny - much, much funnier than Vivienne Vyle. Simple pastiche is not enough to get a laugh these days, you have to take it to a whole different place. And you have to be a bit mad too, which Serafinowicz clearly is.

A lot of it is not so successful - the Big Brother house full of clones that is frequently returned to, for example, is just tedious. But this is a sketch show, the format for which the phrase 'hit and miss' was invented.

Actually, I'm not convinced that there's a lot of life left in the sketch-show format. Mitchell and Webb did their best to kill it off. But Peter Serafinowicz, with his wacky take on the world, may just have raked up a few dying embers. Maybe next time he'll do something else.

We don't tend to do five syllable English surnames, let alone stick names that long in the title of brand-new comedy shows. All power then to Peter Serafinowicz's (Polish) ethnic elbow for managing to get his name in lights for what promises to be a reliably entertaining series of sketch comedy.

As a tried and tested impressionist, Serafinowicz will be impersonating such stars as Al Pacino and Simon Cowell - while introducing a crop of characters from incompetent private detective Brian Butterfield to Michael-6, robot chat show host.

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