Tess Daly

Dougie Colon's cod-Lancashire accent has not improved since the series started. This would be less of a problem if Tess Daly, on whose husband, Vernon Kay, Colon is surely modelled, wasn't one of the guests.

She's going head to head (well, perhaps not quite) with Ronan Keating in a battle that includes some of the livelier Puppet Show games. It's like a bizarre circus. See them strapped to a giant revolving glittery wheel! Watch as they race to blow out 100 candles! Laugh as they fail to name the Chancellor and the members of the G8!

As ever, the sideshow - the behind-the-scenes puppet soap which has a hint of human sadness about it - is just as diverting as the main event.

If you thought The Social Network told the definitive story of the birth of Facebook, Vic and Bob have other ideas.

Their film about Facebook's little-known roots in the 1970s is the highlight of another ­unpredictably mental half-hour.

On the receiving end of their surreal ribbing/bullying tonight are Waterloo Road's Mark Benton, the Mirror's own Tess Daly, Chris Packham and the fashionable Alexa Chung.

Conservationist Packham goes along with the joke - even after resident weirdo Angelos ­Epithemiou does ­something very unexpected to a robin.

Even team captain Jack Dee cracks a smile.

But poor Alexa looks like she wishes she'd stayed at home.

She might as well have done too - her contribution here is purely a decorative one.

He's a great stand-up and I love his sitcom, Not Going Out. So my expectations were already ridiculously high for Lee Mack's new talk show, Lee Mack's All Star Cast which made its debut on BBC 1, Friday night. I wasn't disappointed.

Despite the fact that it was all fairly shambolic and chaotic - like it had been shot and edited on a shoestring budget for Channel 5 - the strength of Lee Mack's character and his sharp Northern wit kept it entertaining and fast paced from beginning to end.

During the show guests Frank Skinner and Fern Britton were invited to guess who various audience members were supposed to look like and choose their most embarrassing stories - all very Graham Norton, though somehow much more engaging. Lee Mack was also great in his ability to take the piss out of his guests without them taking umbrage.

But without doubt the best bit of the show was the sketch which saw Mack in his bed sit trying to get Tess Daly to ditch her hubbie 'Peter Kay' and sleep with him while being serenaded by James Blunt taking off his monster hit, You're Beautiful.

It was all reminiscent of Eric Morecambe at his best (indeed there was an Eric Morecambe poster on the door of the bed sit). And Tess Daly's acting skills were a revelation. She could have found it all rather embarrassing but really went along with it.

Looking forward to the next one, though I hope they manage to sort out the editing!

If you want an antidote to the cross-channel razzmatazz of Saturday-night TV, you can hardly improve on The Thick of It. With its grey look, its cynicism and its torrent of profanities, it's about as far from a grinning Tess Daly as you could get. It's also horribly funny, in a nasty, mean way. "Get over here now," bawls Malcolm Tucker at hapless minister Nicola Murray after her latest gaffe, "and it might be advisable to wear brown trousers and a shirt the colour of blood..." His raw temper and sulphurous turn of phrase are at the heart of the programme but the bumbling of the civil servants is always a source of joy, too. This week they've wiped all the details of UK immigrants by mistake. Whoops. To be brutal, the characterisation isn't quite as assured as in previous series and there isn't the same streamlined brilliance to the plotting, but it's still essentially wonderful.