Rob Brydon

He's the man they turned to when Brucey was too ill to present Strictly. He was caught taking drugs in Extras and entertained Bubbles DeVere in Little Britain. This year, to mark his 80th birthday, he'll have his own Christmas Day sketch show. Yes, it can only be unlikely national treasure Ronnie Corbett, the short comedian with the long career, charted here with loving input from his hordes of admirers including Miranda Hart, Rob Brydon, Stephen Merchant, Matt Lucas and Michael Palin.

Charming and entertaining documentary Being Ronnie Corbett pays homage to the nation's favourite vertically challenged comedian.

Ronnie celebrated his 80th birthday at the start of this month, and he is in sparkling form here as he looks back on his career spanning half a century.

It goes from his early days feeling up Danny La Rue's boobs during West End cabaret shows, to his snorting cocaine off a toilet seat in Extras, via his famous chair where he delivered his signature shaggy dog stories.

Fellow comedians including the likes of Rob Brydon, Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Catherine Tate queue up to give him a not insubstantial verbal pat on the back.

Affable comedian Rob Brydon (The Trip, Gavin & Stacey) asks cranky colleagues Jo Brand and Jack Dee to spread festive cheer on this light-hearted entertainment show. The two guests play up to their bah-humbug personas, with Brand suggesting an unusual way to get rid of unwanted relatives. Sozzled children's entertainer Jeremy Lion (Justin Edwards) offers a hilarious, wine-fuelled take on The Twelve Days of Christmas. And gothic rocker Alice Cooper shares the sofa with charismatic baritone Bryn Terfel.

Never take a TV hit for granted. I'd raved about The Trip and for five weeks it was brilliant, but am I allowed to say I thought the final episode was the weakest, that it teetered on the edge of sentimentality much like Steve Coogan teetered on those stepping stones over the river at Bolton Abbey?

No show is absolutely note-perfect and it's only because Coogan and Rob Brydon set such a high standard for themselves that I raise this minor grump. Real or pretend, Coogan went into The Trip mildly haunted by Alan Partridge, then laid down his best post-Partridge work. Who won the battle of the impressions? I loved Coogan's submarine noises and his Liam Neeson ("I WILL hunt you down"). The Michael Caine, Roger Moore and Woody Allen face-offs probably ended in draws but I think I'd have to give it to Brydon for his Al Pacino, his Ronnie Corbett and his generic Bond villain.

Come, come, Mr Bond, you like food-based comedy love-in travelogues just as much as I do.

The competitive comedians are up early to visit Bolton Abbey: "I liked Bolton Abbey before you liked Bolton Abbey," carps Steve Coogan to Rob Brydon, before they launch into a scene, standing in the graveyard, where they imagine Brydon's funeral and what Coogan might say at it. This is the prelude to a delicious pratfall, a sunlit breakfast and a lot of singing (about the only thing the pair agree on is a love for Abba's The Winner Takes It All.) It's all enjoyable and, as a muted meditation on celebrity and friendship, less insubstantial than it looks.

Rob Brydon stars in £13m Kellogg's ad campaign

Kellogg's has hired comedian Rob Brydon to front a £13m marketing campaign for its Crunchy Nut cereal brand.

The Trip gives tourists a taste for the Lakes

The Trip, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, has given a huge boost to visitor numbers in the Lake District, Lancashire and the Dales.

On paper, The Trip sounds bloody awful: a cosy, luvvie giant in-joke for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, showing off their impressions and them eating ridiculously fancy meals. So why is it so completely brilliant? "It's not about the destination, it's the journey," as 'Steve' described his refusal to use satnav, but referring also, surely, to the incidental banter and bickering between them which is gradually revealing their true selves. Or 'true selves'.

And it's also hilarious: their Michael Caine-off, "we rise at dawn-ish" and last night's ABBA duet may soon replace Alan Partridge's most quotable lines as the things fans greet Steve Coogan with. Which will be some small compensation for him still not being able to do Rob's "I'm a small man in a box" voice.

Filling me with feelings of inadequacy for the comparative dullness of my banter, the relative poverty of my impressions - are Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, regrettably coming towards the end of The Trip. There's been precious little else on the box these last few years that has got my wife and me shedding big fat tears of laughter, but The Trip never fails to oblige. I love it for its originality and its daring. And hats off to Coogan in particular for allowing himself to seem so obsessed with his place in the entertainment firmament. Last night, he compared his own three Baftas to Brydon's none, which wouldn't have been quite so funny without the suspicion that he meant it.

We're almost at the end of this unique comedy creation, which serves up English countryside to the tune of top level bickering from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon over a series of very expensive lunches.

Part of the fun is working out how much of their not very polite and utterly random dinner party conversations have been thought out in advance, and how much is just flowing off the top of their heads as the food gets shovelled in.

Tonight, in the Nidderdale Valley, they're riffing on an Abba song, the comparative merits of Les Dawson and Woody Allen, and they learn more about limestone than they could possibly ever want to. Yes, it's all very moreish.