Tim Dowling

The Goes Wrong Show review

This Christmas special from the team behind The Play That Goes Wrong is brimming with bedlam, from awful-on-purpose props to a sozzled Santa.

Year of the Rabbit review

Silly and gleefully sweary ... but where were the gags?

Rob Delaney on how comedy helped him cope through grief

After his two-year-old son Henry died last year, the creator and star of Channel 4's Catastrophe took solace in life's funny moments.

Ministry of Justice review

Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse take the pee out of urine tests and drug crime but fail to nail the hypocrisy.

Cuckoo season four review

Having killed off its title character three seasons ago, this perky comedy revels in an anything-can-happen perversity.

Keith Lemon: Coming in America review

Leigh Francis has stretched his comic creation paper thin over the past 18 years, but there is a weird purity that tickles my fancy.

Reviews: Damned and Bliss

Jo Brand and Morwenna Banks's sitcom is scathing and subtle as it makes unfunny subjects hilarious. Plus: playing bigamy for laughs in Bliss.

"My name is Erin Quinn. I'm 16 years old and I come from a place called Derry." This narrated introduction to Derry Girls (C4) is not all it seems: Erin's weird cousin Orla was reading aloud from Erin's purloined diary, much to Erin's consternation.

Set in 1990s Northern Ireland and loosely based on the teen years of writer Lisa McGee (Being Human), Derry Girls is such a fresh look at growing up with the Troubles as a constant backdrop that it sometimes unsettles, although it mostly stays on the charming side of wicked. Erin (Saoirse Monica Jackson) and her friends long to break free from the conformity of their convent school, but lack the resolve for even minor defiance. "I'm not being individual on me own," says Clare.

Rounding out the group is loudmouth loose cannon Michele, who turns up to the first day of school with her English cousin James, the son of her aunt Cathy. "She went to England to get an abortion and never came back," said Michele. "Never had the abortion either."

Such difficulties as the girls face spring as much from their desire to fit in as from their attempts at rebellion, and the Troubles are presented, so far, as an inconvenience - soldiers boarding school buses, bombed bridges ruining plans - far less frightening than stone-faced headmistress Sister Michael.

You couldn't call Derry Girls nostalgic, exactly; it doesn't make me long to be the only English boy in a 90s Irish girls' school without any men's loos. But the period is recreated with care, and the script is affectionate, foul-mouthed and funny. I'm looking forward to next week.

Count Arthur Strong review

Steve Delaney's hapless comedian is back for a third series, and its gleeful mix of visual gags and absurdist dialogue puts to bed the idea that he is ill suited to TV.

Zapped review: hard to find any evidence it's a comedy

This is an amiable show, but its bunch of magical losers will have you wanting to leave their parallel universe and head home.