Sarah Dempster

Roger and Val - and other boring TV couples

At its best "dull couple" comedy captures with affection the minutiae of everyday mundanity. At its worst, it's just people in jumpers talking about power tools.

In her first Christmas special since 2000, Wood presents a sketch compendium dedicated to the vagaries of middle age. There is an episode of Lark Pies to Cranchesterford and the return of Julie Walters as delusional soap duchess Bo Beaumont. The one-liners crackle but there's an air of exhaustion to the proceedings, with skits on txt spk and the menopause so quarter-baked you start to wonder whether it might be time to reassess Wood's hitherto incontestable Grade II-listed status. But then along comes Walters with another joke about biscuits and, phew, everything goes national treasure-shaped again. In a nutshell: lumpy.

Fresh from his victory at the British Comedy Awards, telly's preeminent pop-culture satirist returns for a gander at 2009. Details are vague when it comes to the subjects of Hill's absurdist quips and pump-action puns, although experience suggests a healthy conflation of reality-based indignity, talent show poltroonism, satellite flimflam, plus Dev from Coronation Street.

From Laurel and Hardy's collapsing pianos to Reeves and Mortimer's oscillating frying pans, this diverting documentary traces the enduring appeal of physical comedy. While its origins are ascribed to a combination of anti-authoritarianism, sadism and reckless juvenility, clips illustrate the meticulous timing vital to the custard pie and the banana skin. Barry Cryer, Ben Miller and Graeme Garden are among the expert insight-dispensers; but what it all boils down to is Frank Spencer hurtling through a shopping precinct on roller-skates ("BETTY!"). Champion.

By his own admission, Keith Barret is not a natural performer and his interactions with the audience here combine crashing naivety with staggering social ineptitude. Yet this routine, "an uplifting chat about marriage" - as delivered by Rob Brydon - is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Brydon first sketched Barret in the wonderful Marion and Geoff monologues and, in this show from 2005, he's drawn a fully three-dimensional character. Sandwiched between two routines from host Jack Dee, Brydon is outstanding.

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Guardian Review

It's not been the easiest week for the pseudo-piratical japester. And yet Ponderland offers Brand the chance to redeem himself, via the medium of Comedy. It's an opportunity to lay waste to the haters and prove his comic chops to those who doubt his talent/point in the wake of Sachsgate. And yet Ponderland is not funny. It's lazy and rambling, dull and annoying.

Satire! It's great. Except for when it's not, obviously. Then it's rubbish. That Have I Got News For You manages consistently to avoid the potholes routinely occupied by its contemporaries (to wit: crudeness, the triumphs of ego over comedic esprit de corps, Jason Manford, etc) is testament not only to the chemistry between long-serving team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, but to wit so sublime it can turn a one-liner on Gordon Brown's incisors into a dazzling nugget of incontrovertible topical wisdom.

Returning as the show's guest host tonight is This Morning's astonishingly game/foolhardy Fern Britton. Place your bets now on how many seconds will elapse before Paul Merton mentions g*stric b*nds.

There are many reasons to distrust this panel show, and not just because the participants spend most of their time lying through their shameless celebrity teeth. There's the suspiciously enthusiastic laughter that follows each of host Angus Deayton's excruciating autocue segues; the fact that the format is essentially that of a slightly ruder Call My Bluff (Call My Guff, if you will); and the baffling 'futuristic' set that makes the panellists look as if they're sitting behind pulsating tubes of Fruit Polos. It should be rubbish.

Instead, amazingly, it's a blazingly silly, raucously shambolic joy. And the off-the-cuff guffaws come think and fast. Let nonsense-based battle commence.

'I am the best safe-cracker this country has ever produced!' hisses Maurice Riley (Anthony Head) as he fiddles his way through a phalanx of whirring mechanical wotsits. Such an assertion would be worrying at the best of times, but the fact that it's uttered by a man in a pink satin blindfold suggests that this is not a character to be trifled with. And he's not.

In the first episode of this curious new comedy drama we join the putatively reformed criminal and his hapless chum Syd (Warren Clarke) as they relocate from the Costa del Larceny to a dinky village in Devon. The resulting romp has some flashes of sweetness - not least the wonderful Dean Lennox Kelly as a crafty publican - but so cantankerous is Maurice, and so daft are his scrapes, that you may find it difficult to care.