Stephen Fry

Look out for a revealing exchange tonight between Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, comedy's most unlikely double act. They're friends off-screen, and there's a lovely spat where Fry grumbles under his breath that Davies didn't invite him to his wedding. "I DID invite you but you didn't come!" Davies protests, and Fry has to bury his head in his hands in shame as Davies reminds him that it was filming an episode of Bones that kept him away.

Aside from these recriminations, it's the usual pattern of recent QI episodes: Fry answering his own questions at length while the panellists chuckle along. Along the way, there's a detour into bestiality, some amusing Korean sayings and the timeless line: "Are you ready for me to pump the custard?"

It's a round titled "Kit and Kaboodle" and Stephen Fry wants to know if there's a use for kitty-litter that doesn't involve cats. Alan Davies tries to be helpful, but his contribution ("In an episode of Jonathan Creek I weed into some cat litter") isn't quite what Fry is after. Ross Noble and Noel Fielding, with Australian comic Colin Lane, can't quite lift the episode off the ground.

But there are some bright bits, including Fry demonstrating martial arts on a pile of three bricks: "This takes extreme focus and extreme pain," says Fry, wincing in agony.

Bad Education has got Jack Whitehall in it and Jack Whitehall is sick. (As I believe young people are wont to describe things of which they violently approve.) Whitehall (born 1988, the bastard!) is someone you might certainly wish to hate if he weren't so utterly charming, enormously talented and disarmingly honest. He went to Marlborough (he's the son of an actress and a leading theatrical agent) and one of the things that's great about him is that he makes absolutely no pretence that he's anything other than a smug, louche, overprivileged, desperately middle-class public school tosser with a weapons-grade sense of entitlement.

Whitehall has built his career on playing thinly-disguised versions of himself, whether as the eyelash-batting school tart flirting outrageously with susceptible prefect Stephen Fry on QI, or as swaggering Old Stoic JP in Fresh Meat or, in Bad Education, the spectacularly useless, impeccably middle-class, Mumford & Sons-loving Mr Wickers.

There is lots wrong with Bad Education, starting with the fact that it has nothing whatsoever satirically insightful to say about the failings of sink comprehensives like the one in which it is set. And how come the class sizes are smaller than you get in many private schools? And how come the kids, even the supposedly delinquent ones, all have hearts of gold? In truth, Bad Education would work just as well on a spaceship, or in a jungle village, or in the lodging house shared by three priests on a remote Irish island...

Just like Father Ted, though (which of course gave us little insight into the Catholic Church), Bad Education transcends its obvious limitations by simple virtue of being naturally funny. From the way it's shot to the way it's acted, it oozes the cocky, infectious confidence of a winner.

It doesn't matter that the jokes are hit and miss. When they work, you love them, like the one where the white headmaster, who has already upset a black parent with the insensitive use of a racial term ('Perhaps, with hindsight best left to rappers. Eh, bro?'), decides to open the school swimming gala as if it were an Olympic ceremony. He does so in a white bathrobe, lighting a candelabra of torches which unfortunately collapses to become a flaming cross, even as the pointed hood on his robe sticks up and he dances in embarrassment as the black parent looks on in horror. Totally contrived; utterly ludicrous; but a gag that will stick in the memory like the rude vegetables scene from Blackadder II.

Knee-jerk reactions, klaxons and Kiesselbach's plexus are among the subjects under scurrilous discussion as QI returns for its 11th series - which means we've reached the letter K in our comedy intellectual hike through the alphabet. Fount of all knowledge Stephen Fry is back on his throne, the kittenish Alan Davies by his side, joined tonight by perennial quiz show panellist David Mitchell, versatile Jack Whitehall - showing his brainy side after laddy larks with One Direction on A League Of Their Own - and comedian Sara Pascoe. Kick back and find out how Father Christmas, the colour orange and pandas manage to pad their way into the show.

Rob Brydon's Stephen Fry suicide attempt joke attacked

Comedians often teeter on the edge between offensiveness and humour, but when Rob Brydon poked fun at his fellow QI star Stephen Fry's suicide attempt during a celebrity awards show his gag was reportedly greeted with silence not laughter.

BBC rejects claim Stephen Fry 'trivialised' child abuse

The BBC Trust has rejected a complaint that Stephen Fry "trivialised" child abuse during an episode of QI in which he recited a limerick about a chaplain's desire for a choir boy.

Stephen Fry interview

"The beauty of the brain is that you can be as greedy as you like for knowledge and it doesn't show"

Stephen Fry: France is better educated than Britain

And the QI presenter thinks education secretary Michael Gove could be on to something with his proposals for a new curriculum...

PM rejects Fry's call for boycott of Russia's Olympics

The Prime Minister has rejected a call from broadcaster Stephen Fry to strip Russia of the 2014 Winter Olympics because of its treatment of gay people.

Stephen Fry calls for Olympics ban

Broadcaster Stephen Fry has urged David Cameron to support moves to strip Russia of the 2014 Winter Olympics because of its new anti-gay laws.