Salman Rushdie

One project that has mixed humour with serious subject matter for the last thirty years is Comic Relief which aired it's bi-annual Red Nose Day last Friday. As well as the climax of both The Bake-Off and The People's Strictly; Red Nose Day saw the return of many comedy icons. The sketch that the team seemed to be most proud of was the Little Britain clip in which David Walliams' Lou was now the carer for Professor Steven Hawking. However I wasn't a particular fan and by the clip's third airing I'd grown tired of seeing Hawking become a transformer and finish off both Lou and Catherine Tate's Irish nun. The more successful returns came courtesy of Mr. Bean and The Vicar of Dibley with the latter presenting a cameo-laden sketch in which Geraldine meets her rivals for the position of the first female bishop. There were two sketches that I particularly enjoyed the first of which featured a host of famous faces vying to become Britain's newest national treasure. Featuring everyone from Salman Rushdie to The Chuckle Brothers; this sketch was amusing throughout and had a great pay-off. Similarly I felt that Comic Relief's take on Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen skit was inspired with a quartet of the organisation's famous fundraisers competing to see who had the most gruelling experience. There were other little moments that made me chuckle most notably when voiceover man Matt Berry came onto to stage to argue with host Claudia Winkleman. However, Comic Relief isn't really about the sketches or the laughter but rather the money that's raised at the end of the night. The final scene, in which Lenny Henry revealed that the organisation has raised more than a billion pounds over the past thirty years, was one of the most heartwarming TV moments I've seen all year. Henry's pride in what Comic Relief has done over the years was brilliant to see and it just proves what the British public can achieve when they put their minds to something.

In and Out of the Kitchen transfers from Radio 4 not wholly successfully, but there's ample time enough yet and Miles Jupp is amply talented enough to make it very funny indeed. The conceit - a mildly pompous cookery writer, puttering with amiably passive aggression between boyfriend, agent and deadlines - works well enough but, seen in real-time rather than radio-imagined, it is just so relentlessly London middle-class as to be both its main point and chief drawback. The recipe asides work wonderfully well: the agent's predictable Salman Rushdie phone-gags work as well as avocado cheesecake.

In and Out of the Kitchen is another scion from radio that was pleasing to ear and eye without ever being particularly funny. It owed a debt to The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester's exquisite first novel about a pompous gourmand. Damian Trench is not (yet) a mass murderer like Lanchester's Tarquin Minot, but he is another florid stylist who takes his grub seriously. You sense his creator, Miles Jupp, takes comedy seriously too, as this was as carefully assembled and composed as the most exacting recipe from Le Gavroche. Occasionally Trench spoke directly to camera, occasionally there were some (rather beautifully filmed) recipe sequences, but this was capable modern sitcom, capably presented.

Trench was a snob. Almost every great comic creation is, because the gap between the snob's view of themselves and how they're viewed by others is full of comic possibilities. Unfortunately Trench's snobbery, in episode one, was particular - he couldn't abide posh restaurants or fad diets and he refused to moderate his copy for a new column in "Waitsbury's" magazine. I suspect this makes him a snob to whom few can relate, and that In and Out of the Kitchen will remain a niche pursuit. Any sitcom reliant on a running gag about Salman Rushdie has probably found its natural berth on BBC Four.

Sometimes you watch a comedy and think "this is clever, isn't it?" and then you realise that, actually, you're not laughing all that much. So it was with W1A (BBC Two), a sort-of sequel to Olympics spoof Twenty Twelve that switches the satirical spotlight on to the BBC itself.

Look at us, we're the BBC and we can laugh at ourselves, is the subtext as David Tennant's arch voice-over guides us around BBC HQ in a maze of corporate speak, introducing us to a grazing herd of corporate types with a remit to think Big Thoughts and babble nonsense about 'appointment to view' television.

In the middle of it all, doing his dazed labrador thing, returns Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher, this time as the BBC's new Head of Values, which seems to be exactly the same job as Director of Strategic Governance, played with obsequious brilliance by Jason Watkins, a comic actor of impressive versatility.

So far, so potentially side-splitting. Somehow, though, the in-jokery felt a touch too pleased with itself. A scene where Fletcher stumbled in on Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob in the middle of an arm-wrestle bout was telling, a bit like that first day in a new job when someone says: "You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps" and you cringe, thinking: "Get me out of here now."

Let's not sound too harsh: W1A is ingeniously scripted, painting a neat picture of a culture where covering your back is number one in any ambitious individual's skill set. And things really picked up when, belatedly, Jessica Hynes returned as nightmare PR Siobhan Sharpe, a character so deliriously loathsome it really is funny. Whereas seeing a BBC run by bumbling idiots is merely believably bothersome: after all, we're paying for them.

Radio Times review

This new sitcom was born out of the success - but necessarily short shelf life - of the delicious Twenty Twelve. The idea of the BBC making a satire on the workings of the BBC is painfully circular but also, as it turns out, painfully funny.

Even so, the show walks a tightrope. In one scene here, Ian "So that's all good" Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), now the BBC's newly appointed Head of Values, is hunting for a meeting room at Broadcasting House. He opens a door to find Alan Yentob and Salman Rushdie arm-wrestling while listening to opera. It's both a hilariously daring in-joke and the kind of thing you hope they keep in small doses. Too many knowing winks at the audience could get precious.

There are other celebrity cameos, but the joy of the show, as with Twenty Twelve, is the bland corporate-speak, the ability of conversations to progress with nothing being said in a flurry of Yes-no-absolutelys and Right-goods. This is writer John Morton's special gift (he's been doing it since People like Us on Radio 4) and he does it better than anyone.