Richard Ayoade

One of the few festive programmes where the people on screen are normally drunker than the viewers. Jimmy Carr again presides over a panel game that usually attracts a good deal of correspondence from people who like to be offended at Christmas.

The passing of legislation earlier this year forcing Jack Whitehall to be included in all comedy programmes on all channels was controversial, but - perhaps due to some sort of hangover from his competitive days as a public schoolboy - he's well suited to the quiz format.

Whitehall and fellow bellower Jonathan Ross have gentler comic minds to offset them, answering questions about the past 12 months of news: Kristen Schaal is this year's woman, and there's also Richard Ayoade, who's effortlessly defused this gnarly bearpit in past Big Fat Quizzes. Plus, Noel Fielding and Dara O'Briain.

In an inspired piece of scheduling, Channel 4 bins the Come Dine With Me repeats and dedicates the whole of Christmas Eve to Graham Linehan's honkingly funny sitcom. Set in a terrifyingly realistic man cave in the basement of a dysfunctional London company it is, according to those who know their ethernet cables from their elbows, almost a documentary.

Surrounded by empty boxes, unopened manuals, stickers and plastic desk toys, Moss (Richard Ayoade) and Roy (Chris O'Dowd, before he was Bridesmaids famous) skive, snigger, talk about girls and tell anyone with an ailing computer to turn it off and on again. Noel Fielding lives in the cupboard. Their female boss knows nothing of these annoying computer thingies and is preoccupied with her car crash love life.

In honour of this festive extravaganza, fans have voted for their favourite episode and Linehan has nominated his. There is also a repeat of the final one-off show from earlier this year and a documentary featuring interviews with cast and A-list fans.

Of course, every night is IT Crowd night somewhere on the Channel 4 network. Like Father Ted, it's become one of those endlessly repeated classics that feels dangerous to even dip into for fear of finding yourself still transfixed a couple of hours later.

So what is Graham Linehan's secret? No real clues from The IT Crowd Manual', the doc which, at 10pm, forms the centrepiece of this celebration. What he's done seems simple: in both Father Ted and The IT Crowd, the classic sitcom formula (a hermetically-sealed world, characters who never learn lessons) is equipped it with self-awareness and real warmth. Oh, and the perfomances are magnificent - Richard Ayoade, Chris O'Dowd, Katherine Parkinson and Matt Berry are all charmingly present and correct and all seem rightly proud to have been involved in such an adored show.

If you tune in an hour before the doc, you'll get another chance to catch the hour-long special that closed the series earlier this year; from 11.05pm, we'll be finding out which episodes the show's fans and creator hold dearest. A Christmas Eve treat.

Regardless of the fact that the TV schedules are already rammed with the damned things, all sharing near-identical formats, television continues to spew out comedy panel shows. Channel 4's Was It Something I Said? is the latest manifestation of a tedious trend.

The basic premise, upon which the contestants are invited to riff, is the world of quotes and quotations. A world very familiar to anyone who has listened to an edition of BBC Radio 4's Quote... Unquote during its 49 series' residency.

But originality clearly isn't high on Was It Something I Said?'s priorities. Take a look at the line-up - David Mitchell in the chair, Richard Ayoade and Micky Flanagan as team captains, and Charlie Higson and Jimmy Carr as guests.

Individually, I like them all. Collectively, as part of a comedy panel show, their terrible familiarity provokes in me a level of screaming boredom that is borderline hysterical.

Even the fine actor David Harewood, roped in as guest 'reader', has been spotted slumming it elsewhere in the BBC's Would I Lie to You?. Presumably, Harewood's ambition was atomised at the end of Homeland's second series, along with his character.

But possibly the most predictable and depressing aspect of the show was its total absence of women. Whether this was the deliberate product of an anti-feminist agenda, or simply down to the fact that Sarah Millican wasn't available, we can only guess.

David Harewood appeared on Was it Something I Said?. That's quite a fall, from being head of the CIA to reading out quotes on a Channel 4 gameshow. Basically it's that Radio 4 show Quote Unquote on the telly, with David Mitchell asking the questions. And the questions being "who said this?" and "how does this quote go?"

Not the most imaginative format then, but of course it's not really about the game, it's about which panellist can be funniest. And the answer to that is Richard Ayoade. Certainly he's much funnier than his teammate Jimmy Carr; they don't seem to like each other very much either, which is quite jolly. No women about obviously, it being a panel show.

A new panel show hosted by David Mitchell has to be worth a look. It's a quotation-based game, somewhere in tone between Radio 4's Quote Unquote and QI, as they all try to guess who said what or complete famous quotations. On one team Richard Ayoade turns out to be perfect to duel with, gainsay and generally neutralise Jimmy Carr - hilariously so. Micky Flanagan and Charlie Higson are on the opposing team.

The rhythms of the game itself are still a bit halting (it's early days) but the guests are funny enough that it barely matters - when Micky Flanagan impersonated David Mitchell being a bailiff, it's almost as if we're watching Would I Lie To You? - and in this genre there's no higher compliment.

Does David Mitchell ever catch Jimmy Carr's eye across the set of a crowded panel show and think: 'I know exactly what you're going to say here'? More opportunities for celebrity ennui tonight. This new series sees Mitchell in the chair, Carr as a guest and other usual suspects Micky Flanagan, Charlie Higson and Richard Ayoade making up the numbers.

The wild card is the slightly out-of-his-element guest David Harewood, who has presumably been selected for his boomingly stentorian voice, because the core of the show is quotes - famous ones, outlandish ones and obscure ones. It's not the most striking panel-show concept we've ever come across and, notwithstanding a couple of mildly amusing moments - including Harewood's scarily good Obama impression - it never quite gets off the ground.

Mitchell's other regular panel gig, Would I Lie to You?, has punched above its apparent weight for years now, but we'd bet against this proving similarly enduring.

Was It Something I Said?, yet another comedy panel show (this one based, with great originality, around quotations), has been hand-tooled to inherit Homeland's audience, not only going out directly after the new adventures of Carrie Mathison, but also featuring actor David Harewood - Homeland's now blown-to-smithereens CIA director David Estes - as guest quotation reader.

Host David Mitchell has, of course, been recently conducting a media discourse with Fast Show creator Charlie Higson over whether or not comedy panel shows are blocking other, rather more expensive forms of television comedy. Higson was a guest last night, so the timing of that spat makes you cynically wonder whether it wasn't merely pre-show publicity, or whether Higson had a genuinely bad time recording last night's opener.

Mitchell's riposte has been that panel shows are often more funny than scripted comedy, a view to which I'm not unsympathetic, especially when Richard Ayoade was holding forth last night, effortlessly neutralising supposed team-mate Jimmy Carr. Did I write neutralise, or did I mean neuter? These macho cockfights are the reason why female comedians give such shows a wide berth, and needless to say, all six panellists were male. Mitchell had even grown a Mumford-lush beard, while Carr appeared to be in the process of growing one - it was as if their faces were actively leaking testosterone.

Those familiar with Graham Linehan's hyperactive Twitter presence will be unsurprised by some of the subjects tackled in this the hour-long finale of his geeky, live audience sitcom: embarrassing viral videos, anonymous hacktivists, the NSA. It's a testament to his fine plotting skills and mastery of tone that such dark fare is seamlessly woven into the shows usual cartoonish set pieces and Seinfeldian verbal tics ('small-person racist', 'emotionally artistic').

Along the way, our hapless trio of Moss (Richard Ayoade, whose new film The Double features original Reynholm Industries head honcho Chris Morris, fact fans), Roy (Chris O'Dowd, fresh from BBC2's Family Tree) and Jen (Katherine Parkinson, thankfully less shrill than in previous series) do battle with tiny baristas, pepper spray, women's slacks and, er, a van with breasts.

Naturally there are plenty of laughs to be had, especially from Matt Berry, on gloriously silly form as lunatic boss Douglas Reynholm.

But it drags in places and the same old problem remains: the main characters elicit no warmth. As a result, when the IT Crowd depart their basement lair for the last time this viewer was left feeling strangely unmoved. Adios then, nerdlingers: gone neither with a big bang nor a whimper.

Radio Times review

The synthy title music buzzes us in for a last, joyous visit to the basement of Reynholm Industries. Since the last series in 2010, Chris O'Dowd has gone A-list in Hollywood and Richard Ayoade's film-directing debut (Submarine) won him a Bafta nomination. But for some of us they'll always be Roy and Moss, socially inept IT engineers saddled with a vague, desperate manager (Katherine Parkinson) whose talent for making things spiral into wrongness rivals their own.

For this extended, goodbye special, it's business as usual. Playboy company boss Douglas (Matt Berry) is thinking of appearing on The Secret Millionaire, Roy is struggling to keep a new girlfriend ("She said that emotionally I'm on the artistic spectrum..."), and he and Jen are caught on a viral video that upsets the internet. "We p****d off the internet, Jen!" wails Roy. The internet is coming to get us!"