Rachel Aroesti

Lee Mack's reliably straightforward sitcom returns for a sixth series with Lee reluctantly coming to the aid of flatmate Lucy after she runs over a potential client's pet rabbit. Complications follow in the form of mistaken identity, a troublemaking parrot and some car keys falling down a drain. It's nothing new, yet it feels oddly novel: long-running, über-traditional sitcoms are currently few and far between.

Judging by the first half of this opener, that might not seem like a great loss. Laboured witticisms come at the expense of proper dialogue, with jokes and puns of wildly varying quality crowbarred into the script at any opportunity. But in those moments when the action builds to almost perfectly constructed silliness, Mack's wooden acting, the stock plot, incessant recaps and broadly etched set-up (Tim Vine's exit from the show is explained with thundering lack of subtlety seconds in) start to gel. Nowadays, we might prefer our farce in more coherent and intelligent surroundings, but you'd have to be pretty serious about comedy to begrudge this steadfast sitcom its enduring success.

This series based on the PG Wodehouse stories rolls to a close with house guest Lady Littlewood (Jessica Hynes) in suspiciously hot pursuit of Timothy Spall's borderline-amnesiac Earl of Emsworth. It's about as close to actual intrigue as this slice of inter-war frippery has got, relying as it does on stock storylines and stubbornly recurring themes (a prominent one being the digestive trials and tribulations of the Empress, the Earl's pet pig).

Guy Andrews's adaptations didn't need to be so straight forward and predictable - there's an awful lot of original Blandings material to mine and the show could have been denser than Lord Emsworth himself. But the advantage of the undemanding plot is the space it allows to wallow in the characters' gloriously ad hoc idiom: the endless variations on his suitor's name as misremembered by Emsworth, the way his son Freddie describes himself in his half-cut state as being 'tight as an owl', and the impending threat of the Empress morphing into 'tragic sausages' on the breakfast table.

It's the turn of The Thick of It's Rebecca Front to head up tonight's short comedy from Sky. Like the majority of these gently amusing films, Rainy Days and Mondays is a little self-indulgent in its nostalgia, trading as they do on their creator's childhood (Chris O'Dowd's effort spawned the brilliant Moone Boy), but the strength and breadth of talent involved make it an enduringly intriguing project.

In her episode, a young Rebecca develops a death-anxiety complex that belies her years and stops her going to school. These films tend not to delve far beneath the surface of the sometimes dark subject matter, leaving their success resting almost wholly on the subtlety of the young actor at the centre. In this case, Lucy Hutchinson does an impressive job of capturing both overbearing childhood dread and the magical moment its shadow lifts.