Rebecca Front

Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is back in a blizzard of vituperation as Gold repeats series three of Armando Iannucci's peerless political satire. Tucker is doling out his "verbal colonics" to a new Secretary of State (splendid Rebecca Front, in a role that won her a Bafta). The inventive expletives bounce off the walls in firework displays of pure filth and bad taste. The dexterousness of the insults remains a marvel, as does the sublime supporting cast - Chris Addison and James Smith - of useless apparatchiks.

Noel Fielding to dance for Comic Relief

Mighty Boosh comic Noel Fielding, The Thick of It star Rebecca Front and comics Russell Kane and Ed Byrne are among the stars who will take part in this year's Let's Dance for Comic Relief.

The importance of seizing life's windows of opportunity was not lost on the team behind the Beeb's other post-Christmas winner [aside from Toast], Just William. Not that it would have taken a casting director of genius to realise that Daniel Roche - the 11-year-old actor who played Ben in Outnumbered - was born to play William Brown, Richmal Crompton's schoolboy anti-hero.

With his natural curls and even more natural scowl, Roche brought Brown to life as no other child actor has before. But what really elevated Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye's adaptation were the moments inbetween young William's adventures and the painstaking attention to detail of its early 1950s period setting.

With an adult cast including Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan as the long-suffering senior Browns, and Warren Clarke and Caroline Quentin as the nouveau riche Botts, Nye's four episodes - perhaps taking inspiration from The Simpsons - fully appreciated that there was room here for all the characters to manoeuvre. There were storylines involving William's sister Ethel, subplots based around the staff at William's school, visits from members of the extended Brown family and, of course, the sthpectacularly sthpoilt Violet Elizabeth.

The sharpness of the script was evident from episode one, in which William's brother Robert, newly obsessed with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, had this exchange with his mother: Robert [mumbling]: "I need to go somewhere." Mrs Brown [not looking up]: "If you're passing the shop could you buy a loaf of bread?" Robert: "No, I need to escape. I'm going to join a biker gang." Mrs Brown: "Righto. Maybe you should borrow Mr Nuttley's motorbike and see if you like it first."

Who of us brought up in the stifling atmosphere of the suburbs will not have had a similar early life exchange, in which a burning passion is reduced, with a seen-it-all-sigh, to the status of hobby?

Thus, while Toast and Just William were both unashamedly nostalgic, both also carried off the crucial trick of ringing true to a 21st-century audience. Good writing, fine acting and a past (unlike the foreign country of Upstairs, Downstairs) that we can all remember and relate to.

It's not too much to ask for is it? And especially at a time of year when, for many of us, the televison screen is the window of opportunity in the corner of all of our living-rooms.

Outnumbered's bloodthirsty Ben is a William for our times, so the casting of actor Daniel Roche, so brilliant as the violence-obsessed middle child in the hit BBC1 sitcom, is perfect. The sublime Martin Jarvis, who is William to so many of us, thanks to his peerless readings of Richmal Crompton's tales on Radio 4, narrates a series of four stories (daily until New Year's Eve). Here William and the Outlaws first encounter insufferable Violet Elizabeth Bott, the be-ribboned, lisping brat who manipulates everyone with her threats to "thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I'm thick". Warren Clarke and, particularly, Caroline Quentin have a whale of a time as Violet Elizabeth's vulgar, nouveau riche parents (dad is the Bott's Digestive Sauce magnate), while Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan are sweetly forbearing as William's mum and dad. It's aimed at kids, but adults will have fun, too, if only as they look back fondly on a world where children could play outside for hours on end and the sun always seemed to shine.

William Brown truly is the boy who never grew up. Created by writer Richmal Crompton in 1922, William has remained 11 years old ever since, infuriating his teachers, embarrassing his mother, and forever trying to shake off the attentions of his spoilt brat of a neighbour, Violet Elizabeth Bott. His antics have already been adapted for television several times over.

This new treatment, written by Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, opts to set the Just William stories in the Fifties - just far back enough to feel like a magical distant world to today's technology-obsessed children. William is played with gusto by Outnumbered's Daniel Roche, but it's the casting of the adults that brings the whole thing to life, especially Rebecca Front (The Thick of It) as William's permanently flustered mother, and Warren Clarke in the pantomime villain role as local condiment magnate Mr Bott (yes, his product really is called Bott Sauce). In this first episode of four to be screened over consecutive lunchtimes, the Bott family has just moved house, with Mr Bott taking a dim view of William's gang using his woods as a base. So William plots his revenge...

Radio Times review

The most unfairly criticised comedy of the year, with sages queuing up to make the shattering observation that Simon Amstell can't act. Why would he need to? He was playing himself in a sitcom about a comedian who, despite considerable success, is paralysed by neuroses and has no communication skills, especially when stuck with his brash, unstarry relatives. Mumbling and nearly corpsing worked for Jerry Seinfeld and were what was required here.

Amstell's merciless dissection of his own personality gave Grandma's House its real-com edge, but more importantly, it had a fabulous cast (Rebecca Front, Samantha Spiro, James Smith) enjoying a script full of spiky but affectionate family ding-dongs, in a Royles/Gavin & Stacey vein. When the later episodes introduced classic sitcom plotting - intricate, chaotic, accelerating - Grandma's House got even better.

It's the last episode of Simon Amstell's carefully crafted sitcom in which he stars as himself. The series has seen some superb performances from its sparkly cast, most notably Rebecca Front as Amstell's onscreen mother Tanya. Tonight, Tanya and Clive's (James Smith) plans to get married are disrupted when Grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) becomes ill.

Rebecca Front (so good in BBC Two's sharp comedy Grandma's House) reads the first of Susan Maguire's trilogy of gentle, humorous stories about a romance. Here's how it started but then, eventually, came to a separation and division of goods. There's Andria who fell in love with handsome, passionate pianist Boris (they bonded over soughdough bread and butter) and Mimi, an elegant Italian greyhound who lay at his feet as he played. Tomorrow, what happens to Boris (and Mimi) after he takes up with Chiara, another artist. Wednesday, Chiara's tale. Yummy stuff.

Complicated family relationships can be played for laughs, which brings me to Grandma's House, now approaching the end of a series that has provoked catcalls and bouquets in roughly equal measure. I'm with the bouquet-throwers, and while I'm aware that you'd have to sit through quite a lot of amateur dramatics before encountering an actor quite as wooden as Simon Amstell, I think he gets away with it, which may indeed be part of the conceit.

The rest of the conceit is that Amstell more or less plays himself, a gay, Jewish comedian called Simon who used to host a TV panel show (Never Mind the Buzzcocks in Amstell's case), and whose mother and grandmother (Rebecca Front and Linda Bassett) are desperate for him to get back on the telly being rude. Last night, they were horrified that he could find nothing funny to say about Peaches Geldof or even Peter Andre, and I was with them all the way; no comedian should ever fall so low.

"Look at us all cooped up in here," grumbles awful aunt Liz. "Sitting around all day, talking a load of rubbish... If this was on telly, people would switch over." It's a brave sitcom that includes such a cheeky line, but Grandma's House can carry it off, just. Tonight the family watches clips of Simon's precocious stand-up efforts, which are in fact clips from star Simon Amstell's own early shows as a kid, complete with squeaky voice and zany waistcoat - prepare to cringe. But the highlight is Simon's mother (Rebecca Front) trying to bully him into doing an ITV charity balloon trip. "Why can't you go in a balloon for your mother?" she urges. "You'd look lovely in a balloon!"