Roland White

The most obvious point about a Richard Curtis comedy is that everybody is quite likeable. This seems pretty basic to me. If you think Bridget Jones has a face like a slapped backside, and a personality to boot, you don't care whether she ends up with Mr Darcy or is left to endure an unhappy marriage with, say, a second-hand car dealer from South Norwood. This was the big problem with Mister Eleven. The heroine, the Bridget Jones of this particular romcom, was absolutely ghastly in every way. She was spoilt, silly, self-absorbed and seemed to be a bit thick, despite being a maths whiz. About 10 minutes into the action, she whipped out her mobile phone and called a convenient shoulder to cry on. "Just this once," said her chosen shoulder, "get over yourself." In our house, there was cheering and high-fiving.

Here is the plot. Saz Paley is a maths teacher who has been obsessed by numbers from a very early age. We know she's a maths teacher because she says "quadratic equations" every so often, and is keen on prob­ability. She tells us, for example, that most women marry the 11th man they sleep with. So Saz, for reasons best known to herself, but essential to getting the show on the road, marries a doctor called Dan for that reason. But, wouldn't you know it, she discovers at the reception that he's not Mister Eleven after all. Mr Nine shows up unexpectedly (as somebody's boyfriend) and reveals that she was too drunk to do anything worthwhile on their one-night stand. Cue collapse of marriage.

What Sazza should probably do next is consult her GP and get something done about her obsessive personality. What she does instead is try to rekindle her relationship with nice Mr Four, who turns out to be married with twins. "Twins?" Saz says. "You must have fantastic sperm." Frankly, it's astonishing that Saz has managed to sleep with four men, let alone 10.

Am I being harsh? Perhaps so, but I suspect that the director also worried about the thin thread on which the plot was attempting to balance. The script works very, very hard to keep us interested. Everything moves quickly, and the action switches every so often to a classroom, which is possibly also Saz's imagination.

Anyway, eventually the inevitable happens. Mr Nine (alias Alex the Australian) meets Saz in a hospital, to which location the plot has inevitably propelled her. You remember, of course, that Saz's husband, Dan, is a doctor. So you'll know what happens next. Alex and Saz embrace passionately. Enter Dan. With non-hilarious consequences.

In the interests of balance, I should warn you that my view of Mister Eleven might possibly be the result of bitterness and middle age. It seems only yesterday that I went to see the film Local Hero and emerged from the cinema as the women in our party swore undying devotion to Denis Lawson, that film's official love interest. In Mister Eleven, he plays an old bloke who is clearly going to have a heart attack or somesuch in episode two. What you have been reading so far could well be a midlife crisis.

The Armstrong & Miller Show is one of the best sketch-comedy series since The Fast Show. Since we're on the subject of class, this is probably because Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller are relatively posh. They are the heirs of Monty Python - via A Bit of Fry & Laurie - in that the core comedy involves authority figures behaving in a way you don't expect. Armstrong and Miller make good authority figures. They are best known as the RAF pilots who speak in modern youth patois. In the first sketch of the new series, the pilots face the firing squad: "No way, blood. I's asthmatic. I could actually die." Jokes about the class system and authority figures ought to be baffling to a modern audience. The 1960s were supposed to sweep all that away. Yet here we are, 40 years later, still trying to make sense of it all. Makes you think, blood, innit?

Between ourselves, I always thought the Goons got a long way with funny voices, strange noises and the comic potential of the term "batter pudding". But it cannot be denied that Sellers, Milligan and Secombe changed the genre with their comic inventiveness, surrealism and sheer cheek: the BBC once banned a scene that had the effrontery to portray the House of Commons dozing gently.

My favourite. Not just a wonderful idea, not just very funny, not just the only known portrayal of a hero travelling the galaxy in a dressing gown, but a show that made real use of the radio medium. And, yes, I realise I have already contradicted myself, but the amusing noises of The Hitchhiker's Guide were somehow more convincing than the amusing noises of the Goons. Perhaps it's a generation thing.

It's been going since about the early 13th century, but is still the funniest thing pretty much anywhere. Need I say more?

Julian, Sandy, Rambling Syd Rumpo and all. It seems astonishing now that the show's host, Kenneth Horne, combined this role with a career as sales director of Triplex glass.

Band Wagon came off the air in December 1939, but it's the daddy of all radio comedy. It was meant to be the usual 1930s light entertainment show - dance bands linked by a comic compere - but the comedy, from Richard Murdoch and Arthur Askey, simply took over. The show became well known for its catch phrases: "Ay thang yew!" and "Ah! Happy days".

Why we won the war. The most successful British radio comedy of all time, it regularly attracted 20m listeners. Its catch phrases - including, "Can I do yer now, sir?" and "It's being so cheerful as keeps me going" - are still remembered years later.

To the modern ear, a collection of stereotypes and elderly jokes. Yet it does everything with such charm, and in its day, which stretched from 1959 to 1977, the characters and situations would be more familiar. Worth listening to again on BBC7 just to hear Leslie Phillips navigating: "Left hand down a bit", etc. Once our longest-running radio comedy.

Toppled The Navy Lark as the longest-running comedy. Spitting Image without puppets. For years, Friday bedtime just wasn't the same without it.