Sally Phillips

On paper this is a bit odd. Using the format of kids' favourite Jackanory to tell grown-up stories feels like a futile exercise. In reality it scores more hits than misses. This is partly down to the choice of storytellers: Jack Dee is the perfect voice of Nico Tatarowicz's modern-morality tale about the perils of social media, featuring Sightseers star Steve Oram as a Twitter-obsessive; while Sally Phillips's twee delivery adds an edge to Toby Davies's macabre story of a toymaker made into an automaton after his death. Both writers have worked on big comedy sketch shows (That Mitchell and Webb Look, Armstrong and Miller) so each story is darkly funny and neatly crafted. Get sitting comfortably.

A nice idea, this, as Dave continues its understandably low-budget move into original programming. Split into two halves, Crackanory offers fairytales for adults.

First, Jack Dee reads Nico Tatarowicz's gloomy Twitter parable Bitter Tweet in which a smug urbanite finds himself at the centre of a social media storm after casually insulting a Justin Bieber-style pop phenomenon. And then Sally Phillips narrates Toby Davis's What Pee Bee Did Next, a more uplifting - if slightly macabre - affair in which an eccentric toymaker attempts to look after his family after his death.

Clearly, the quality will vary over the series but there's something deeply, atavistically satisfying about being read to and something pleasingly minimal about these two tales and the very basic mode of their rendering. Worth a look.

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Chris Morris's scathing satire Brass Eye, Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg's brilliantly offbeat Spaced, Victoria Pile's gloriously surreal Green Wing - Channel 4, it's fair to say, has reeled out a number of memorable comedies since it launched in 1982. Part of C4's Funny Fortnight, this lively two-hour programme counts down its top 30, as voted for by readers of the station's website. "Rude, radical, and irreverent, over the last 30 years Channel 4 comedy has taken us on one hell of a ride," intones the narrator, with no shortage of hyperbole. Though the tone, of course, is self-congratulatory, there's still plenty to enjoy here, not least the terrific archived footage, which reminds you why these show's have such an enduring appeal. Interspersed with these clips are hilarious insights from an impressive array of talking heads: among them, Tamsin Greig, Sally Phillips, Al Murray, Charlie Higson, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes, who says about Spaced: "When I think about all the things I've done, that was the most intense, the most fun, the thing I'm most proud of." One caveat: how did a show as derivative as Star Stories make it on to the list?

By "them" they mean those people, and by "that thing" they mean several different things, or programmes, that have been funny on Channel 4. They (the people) include Kayvan Novak (Fonejacker), Sally Phillips (Smack the Pony) and Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners). But they were upstaged in Them from That Thing, a two-part sketch show with a hit-rate of, I'd say, about 40 per cent, by "proper" actors such as Simon Callow, Bill Patterson and Denis Lawson. The highlight: a libidinous Callow in a satin dressing gown receiving his order of one banana from a supermarket as a ruse to flirt with the delivery boy, saying: "I've been running short of these yellow bitches."

Funny Fortnight charges on with a sketch show with production values higher, unfortunately, than its writing quality. Still, the sheer range of actors who appear in it is appealing: Sally Phillips, Denis Lawson, Inbetweener Blake Harrison - even Simon Callow.