Rory Kinnear

So how does Charlie Brooker's new comic drama - the first of two, with a third written by Jesse Armstrong - open? A touching tale of a WI picnic in 1940s Lancashire? Not quite.

No, we get angst, nightmare and warped comedy dipped in the blackest of paint. A royal princess is kidnapped and the ransom demand - and please stop reading now if you're of a delicate disposition - is that the Prime Minister must have sex with a pig, live on national TV, or the princess gets it.

Rory Kinnear is brilliantly grim as the PM, horrified to discover his beastly dilemma is all over the internet before he can get a lid on the story. He and the whole cast play it very straight, deadpanning lines like "This is virgin territory, Prime Minister, there's no playbook" - which only makes them funnier.

What unfolds as the crisis plays out is filthy and hilarious, but with a dark, satirical edge. Think The Thick of It - and then some.

Charlie Brooker's hotly anticipated comic horror series launches tonight, with Rory Kinnear starring as prime minster Michael Callow. A move away from his sneering, one-man topical shows, the first in the Black Mirror three-part series represents Brooker's first foray into TV dramas. Expect it to be dark, expect to be clever and expect it to be very, very funny.

The BBC has its own credit crunch so repeats are piling up (five, not counting regulars, on Radio 4 alone today). But, as someone once said, it's not a repeat if you missed it first time. So, if this first radio play by Peter Souter escaped you originally, don't let it pass unnoticed now. It's funny, romantic, recognisable. Also beautifully acted (Tamsin Greig, Rory Kinnear, Nicky Henson, Kerry Shale) and directed (by Gordon House). And it heralded the start of Souter's truly promising career. If BBC radio drama funds permit, of course.

Richard Briers stars with Rory Kinnear in Ed Harris's delicate, distinctive play about an old man remembering and disremembering. He's having a dialogue with his younger self (hence the double lead casting), revolving round pictures that lodge in the mind and why they linger. The thing is, some of it is being spoken out loud to the nurse who's checking him over. When she tells him there's a smart strange coat in the kitchen he gets very upset. Then all sorts of voices from the past flood in, echoing memories of childhood, of first love.

Alf is an elderly gentleman and he's getting very confused. He can hear voices in his head and one of them is his own from the days when he was married. This play by Ed Harris is billed as a tender comedy and there are moments when Alf's confusion becomes gently amusing. But the overall feeling is one of sadness and loss. Alf is grieving fomr his wife, but also mourning the troubled state of their marriage and the onset of dementia. He describes the attack upon his memory as like that of an imperial army, with different countries falling every day. Richard Briers and Rory Kinnear play Alf the older and younger with understated directness and genuine empathy. A brilliant drama.

Rory Kinnear squawked his way classily through an exuberant serialisation of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's evergreen satire of journalism.

By some strange turn of fate the new Classic Serial is Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's satire on the press (its ownership, practices and function). The story is simple. We are in the 1930s. A mighty newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, believes wars are good for countries because they unite people against a known enemy. He is persuaded by a beautiful society hostess to send one of her social pets, John Boot, to report the war in far-off Ishmaelia. By mistake, another Boot, William, who writes the Daily Beast's nature notebook, is dispatched. William knows nothing of abroad or reporting. We understand that, like Voltaire's Candide, he will somehow come out of this mess quite well and make us laugh a lot. Jeremy Front has done a deft, sly adaptation, bringing out the brilliance of the characters. Sally Avens has cast it very well (Rory Kinnear as William and Stephen Critchlow as Corker are perfect, David Warner as Lord Copper is pluperfect) and directs it with panache. A better antidote to hysteria cannot be imagined.

The clatter of typewriter keys and a blast of jazz open this energetic dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel about journalism in the 1930s. William Boot (Rory Kinnear) is an unambitious countryside columnist who, by mistake, is sent to report on the civil unrest in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia.

Once there, Boot meets Corker, a roguish news agency reporter - and owner of a treasured collection of Bakerlite elephants - who initiates Boot in the 'dark arts of Fleet Street'.

This production works hard to include as many of Waugh's wonderfully insane characters as possible, from the star correspondents who file moving accounts about uprisings that have never happened, to the African president who sends the hacks on a wild goose chase to a non-existent town. And the most ludicrous location? Popotakis's Ping-Pong Parlour.

Tim McInnerny, Rory Kinnear and David Warner lead an awesome cast in Jeremy Front's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic newspaper satire.

The new Classic Serial is Evelyn Waugh's abidingly comic novel, adapted by clever Jeremy Front (who, among many other things, also does the Charles Paris mysteries on this network). Rory Kinnear plays William Boot, an obscure young country scribe mistaken by mighty newspaper publisher Lord Copper (David Warner) for urbane and experienced reporter John Boot and sent off to report on a war in far-off Ishmaelia. Boot, often thought to resemble the great Bill Deedes in his early days on Fleet Street, flounders out of his depth, gets much wrong but, in the wicked world which surrounds him, somehow shines through.