Sam Wollaston

Still on the love-hate theme, here's Russell Brand Doing Life (Channel 4[/z, Saturday). Obviously again it's mainly hate, since that's the correct thing to think about the dirty snake after what he did to poor Manuel from Barcelona. And actually I think all men hate Russell Brand because they think he might sleep with their womenfolk. He's probably doing so already - with yours, yours, yours, mine ... Hmm, I wondered why she was looking so bloody excited and ever-so-slightly guilty when she went off to "work" this morning.

The man is a ridiculous peacock, of course, with less emphasis on the pea part of the word. He's obsessed with it, constantly putting his hand down there, to draw attention. And the way he stands with his hips pushed forward, at the business end of a thrust, that's his default position. He's like a longbow, primed for action, and we all know what his arrow is, and where he wants to fire it. Eurghh.

Of course he talks a lot of gibberish, a big vomit of camp narcissism, it just pours out of him. Me me me, sleep with me me me. Then he says something about the exaggerated way people in shops look away when you do your pin number (7263 in his case), like Duran Duran: Wild Boys, Wild Boys. And it's impossible not to laugh.

Then he wonders if, for Macaulay Culkin, Michael Jackson's Neverland was Michael Jackson's Sometimes Land. I know puns haven't been funny for about 30 years, but he's found the exception to the rule, and I'm laughing again. And he keeps it up for an hour ... no, not like that! But yes, like that too I imagine, just ask your girlfriend. Or mine. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

It is, quite simply, rubbish. I could go on: crass, juvenile, ill-judged, piss-poorly written, annoying. What was Michael Gambon thinking when he agreed to narrate? Matt Lucas does make a valiant, singlehanded attempt to rescue it, with a spirited performance as the evil Chancellor Dongalor. I did quite enjoy him emptying his chamberpot over Sean Maguire. Golden Powers, the title of this episode, turn to golden showers. But poor Matt is up against too much. The best thing about this second episode is that it was only half as long as last week's opener.

Reggie Perrin isn't dead, worse luck. He's down at the beach, nodding cruelly back to Leonard Rossiter. "Goodbye Old Reggie, hello New Reggie," says Martin Clunes, butt-naked. "Or why not just end it all? Prove once and for all that I'm not a fraud, just walk out to sea ..."

Good idea. Go on, do it. Put yourself out of your misery, and us out of ours. This remake has been a catastrophe, a massive error of judgment. If you go now, maybe the whole thing will be quietly forgotten and the memory of the original can recover.

But he has a packed suitcase with him, ready to come back from the dead, just as Rossiter did. And I fear that can only mean one thing: another series. [Cue lots of canned groaning.]

I did a bad thing during Horne and Corden (BBC3). I'm sorry, and if it's any consolation I'm not pleased with myself. But I laughed. I actually couldn't help it. It was in the first bit, where Corden goes up to a kid in a wheelchair in the audience. And the kid is saying that it's really hard with her old manual chair, especially now her dad has a bad back, and what she'd really like is an electric chair but they cost £5,000. And Corden says that he and Horne have clubbed together for one, and I'm thinking: Oh God they've turned into Noel Edmonds, this is the most horrible, sickening thing I've ever seen. And then Horne comes on with this massive electric chair, the sort you execute people with in America. Old Sparky. And I just couldn't help it, I laughed. Because it was funny, I suppose.

I'm not proud. It didn't happen again in the rest of the show, hasn't happened in either of the previous shows, won't happen again, I promise. They're still a couple of plonkers.

That Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC2), is an angry man. He's an angry man, that Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. And he says thing over and over again, getting angrier and angrier, shouting louder and louder. He says them over again, getting angrier and angrier. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2. He is clever and funny, but everything else and everyone else (especially people who are more successful than him) is stupid and silly. And that makes him very angry. Stewart Lee, off Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. On BBC2.

Sam Wollaston Review

I'm going to give it another go. And that's because some of these guys' (they are all blokes, and probably always will be) ideas are actually pretty funny. Mark and his hood for example. He's hilarious, much funnier than either of the two professionals.

Sam Wollaston Review

A sketch show by G&S stars Mathew Horne and James Corden was never really going to be my thing. But I wasn't prepared for quite how awful it was.

FM is a new sitcom, with the same kind of vibe as The IT Crowd - we're in the workplace, the stars are a woman and two blokes, one of whom is funny Irishman Chris O'Dowd. OK, so the "sit" is different. FM takes place at an indie radio station (it's FM as in frequency modulation). But the "com" is similar - puns and witticisms, misunderstandings, awkward situations. Old-school then, to be polite. Or lame, if you prefer.

The longest-running gag is that O'Dowd somehow gets himself a slot as a proper DJ in a club, even though he doesn't know how to do it - couldn't even mix a metaphor. So he cheats, gets a CD of mixes off a kid (a black character who wears a baseball cap back to front and says "bro" a lot, slightly embarrassingly), and just pretends to be playing vinyl and scratching and doing all that. Guess what, the CD gets stuck (as it was always going to), and he's made to look like an idiot. Do you get it?

There is the odd glimmer of hope. I woke up at one uncharacteristically shocking - and uncharacteristically funny - line. It's too rude to repeat here, but if you saw it you'll know the one I mean (yup, the one about mother-loving). And it has walk-on (kinda) celebrities - in this one, Justin Hawkins from the Darkness, the Guillemots, and Marianne Faithfull in the distance. Celebrities can be funny. We, the jury, will stay out for one more episode, then. But I'm not over-hopeful. It's a brave thing to set a sitcom in a radio station. The last one I can think of is Frasier. No pressure, then.

Jonathan Creek is reborn, after a few years away. He's looking into a series of disappearances in the attic of a big old country pile. More than the murders, though, it's about boobs. Or it certainly looks that way from where I'm sitting. They're everywhere. All the women in the show - Creek's sidekick, her mate, the killer's wife, the porn star in the strange subplot - are wearing virtually northing, and the camera never misses the opportunity to zoom in on a plunging top or a heaving chest. Oops, one of the porn star's bursts; they weren't real, it turns out. But there are still plenty more around to focus on.

To be honest I'm finding it hard to complain about ... but no, I must, this is the Guardian, for heaven's sake. It's gratuitous, all these scantily clad women about the place, simply for the titillation of the viewer. Soft porn masquerading as murder mystery. Where's Benny Hill? Probably in that bath...

Prank-call show Fonejacker has to be the funniest thing on the telly right now. I like the Iraqi man wanting to join the British Army. The recruitment officer is very helpful: he even thinks that Iraq may well be a Commonwealth country.

What, because you occupy it now? says the Iraqi. Erm, we don't occupy it now ... Well, I suppose ... can't really get into all that with you, sir.

It makes you squirm like an eel. But cringing is the new laughing - no, not new, it has been since Ali G, and Ricky Gervais. And this is so beautifully performed - by one man: Kayvan Novak.