Tim Dowling

The Aliens review: otherworldly fun from Misfits makers

Buckle up: E4's new comedy-drama is a rollercoaster ride.

How two late starters made one of 2015's best sitcoms

Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan met on Twitter and conceived their hit comedy Catastrophe thousands of miles apart - can parenthood bring them together?

Catastrophe review: a delightfully blundering finale

The last of six very funny episodes signed off, not with style, but with some wonderfully deranged carnage from Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney.

Detectorists is what might be called a gentle comedy, if the adjective didn't imply a lack of bite and sophistication. Chronicling as it does the ordinary - even sub-ordinary - lives of metal detectorists Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook), it manages to capture the pathetic spite of detectorist territorial disputes ("Immature." "Are you?" "No you are.") without compromising the dignity of its main characters.

Last night Lance was thinking about getting the old band back together. "Did we have a band?" asked Andy. Apparently they did - it was called Pussy Magnet - and Lance had a new song he wanted to debut at the open mic night at the White Horse. The song itself - New Age Girl - was the perfect combination of not very good and terribly moving, not least because Lance accompanied himself on the mandolin the only way he knew how: badly, while sitting cross-legged on the floor. I rewound immediately to watch it again.

In Rev. (BBC Two), where Adam has been asked by two friends, Rob and Jeremy, to officiate at a "proper church wedding" in St Saviour. He can't, of course. It's against canon law, even if it's legal under proper law. His wife, Alex, thinks he should do it anyway. "As long as you don't get caught, it's just like parking on a double yellow," she says. Adam can't risk getting caught, because his church is threatened with closure as it is, for being insolvent and unpopular. To add to his woes, he's just come home without the baby, having left the pram in a shop, although he doesn't even realise this yet. I clocked it straight away, because I once left a baby in a shop. My vigilance now extends to babies from television programmes.

In Rev., Adam managed to recover his baby and offer his friends Rob and Jeremy a non-binding prayer service in church. The happy couple turned up from the register office in their wedding gear with a champagne-sipping, confetti-throwing congregation behind them and proceeded to make Reverend Smallbone's well-meant half-measure look like a very gay wedding indeed. The bishop, naturally, caught wind of it. Adam did his best to do the right thing, and he still got caught.

It was all played for laughs rather than tears - with Olivia Colman's drunk Alex a particular highlight - but at the end Adam got angry and married Rob and Jeremy for real, in the church, in secret. And I cried at that. Could secret gay weddings - and the pink pound - be the saviour of St Saviour?

TV Review: Derek

Unfortunately, most of the problems that plagued the pilot return intact. Ricky Gervais's mannered characterisation stands in uncomfortable contrast to the underplaying of the rest of the cast.

In Funny Business (BBC2), the first of a series, Eddie Mair narrated an investigation into the ways in which standup comedians can make big money, none of which is by telling jokes in comedy clubs.

Appearing in adverts is one way, but many comics find selling stuff on TV to be inconsistent with either their morals or their sense of humour. Not that many, actually. Less objectionable is the corporate gig. You're just doing your act, albeit in front of a room full of company managers for an obscene amount of money. Ricky Gervais gets £25,000 for a 20-minute corporate set. Michael McIntyre gets £40,000. It's not surprising that up-and-coming comedians on corporate booker Jeremy Lee's roster fall over themselves to appear in his annual Real Variety Show, essentially a huge audition for an audience of events company managers. Again, it's just a gig, you end your set with the punchline: "I'm available for bookings, and I also host!"

A lot of comedians won't touch corporate gigs either, but not necessarily for the reason you might think. "I doubt there's one comedian in the world," said Arthur Smith, "who hasn't died on his or her arse at a corporate gig."

Jo Brand finds them bracing - "If you do corporates, you get the message that not everyone loves you," she says - but Rhod Gilbert still gets heart palpitations just driving by the venues of old corporate failures. It may be filthy lucre, but it doesn't sound like easy money.

To be fair, Candy Cabs (BBC1) isn't strictly a comedy. It's a comedy-drama and the mix is, I suppose, a matter of taste. The first episode began at a funeral - Shazza's funeral, according to the pink floral display spelling out her name in the hearse's window - creating a dark and engaging atmosphere that immediately dissipates, not long after they play Tom Jones's Sex Bomb at the cremation.

Shazza, we learn, was the would-be proprietor of Candy Cabs[, until she died in the reduced bread section at Asda, expiring even before the bread did. Her two partners, Jackie and Elaine, decide to go on without her, taking delivery of the new fleet of pink cabs and hiring a load of women drivers. From then on the whole thing becomes terribly insubstantial. Candy Cabs has a company slimming club, which obliges the employees to spend rather more time in their underwear than you find in most cab offices. All the male characters are bastards and idiots who seem to have wandered across from other programmes - especially Paul Kaye as Shazza's cowboy-suited, unscrupulous ex-husband.

A lot of the humour comes from the use of northern turns of phrase that are either meant to strike you as quirkily novel or pleasingly familiar, depending on where you live. Saying: "Look what t'cat's peeled up" when someone walks into a room is not itself a joke, but you might still find it funny if you'd never heard it before. I won't lie - I had to listen to it twice to understand it.

Candy Cabs was, in its own tame and sentimental way, quite enjoyable. If it wasn't often funny, it never raised any real expectations that it would be; and if it was occasionally downright mawkish, well, I have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing. There's still a big hole at the centre of it, but I'm prepared to be charitable and assume it's the character of Shazza. We'll have to find a way to struggle on without her.

Campus (C4) went off the rails. This new comedy boasts some of the Green Wing writers and, at first glance, it has much of the same shape and feel: a dysfunctional institution, in this case a university; a clutch of inadequate grotesques who are obliged to work together; and a lot of surreal dialogue.

It was such a successful formula for Green Wing that it's actually a bit of a puzzle why it backfires so badly here. The setting isn't as claustrophobic - characters are forever striding across open spaces, travelling improbable distances for the briefest of encounters - nor does it benefit from our familiarity with TV hospital drama: whatever happened in Green Wing, it also operated as an effective parody.

The central problem with Campus is that the gossamer-thin thread that tethered Green Wing to a plot has here completely snapped. Everything is too surreal and unmoored. Vice-chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman) is meant to be monstrously ambitious, but he's just monstrous. He's all over the place - shouting out the window, jumping out of cupboards, putting on accents and indulging in freeform sexist and/or racist rants. His character isn't identifiably pathetic, cynical, inadequate or insane; he isn't even a character, really.

You could probably get away with one Jonty de Wolfe, but in Campus everybody else is just as out there. Student-shagging English professor Matt is cruel, contemptuous and vulgar, generally without cause or consequence. If you're not laughing at a character like that, you end up feeling queasily complicit. The meek Imogen is beyond timid; the dumb Nicole beyond moronic. The result is largely bewildering and occasionally offensive.

There is, it must be said, a lot of talent on show in Campus, exploding in all directions to very little avail. The performances occasionally manage to touch on something strange and original. And even something this misconceived is bound to have a few funny moments whenever the story intersects with some recognisable reality. At one point Matt, a teacher who hates teaching, suddenly stands up in the middle of a tutorial. "Right," he says. "I'm going to take a quick boredom break. I'll be back in April." I'm also going to take a quick boredom break, and give it one more go next week.

As the untold story of the formative years of Morecambe and Wise, Eric and Ernie (BBC2, New Year's Day) ran the risk of telling you more than you ever wanted to know, or of drawing too heavily on the national stockpile of affection for the famous double act. And it came sandwiched in the schedule between the duo's 1976 Christmas special and a documentary about them, so that, even if you'd never heard of Morecambe and Wise, you were guaranteed to be sick of the sight of them by bedtime.

Under the circumstances, Eric and Ernie proved a small triumph - a standalone drama that was never hidebound by its subject. It was by turns charming, moving and disturbing. There is something distinctly creepy about child performers, and Eric and Ernie's partnership stretched back to boyhood, when they toured together during the war, staying in digs during blackouts and, yes, sharing a bed.

Daniel Rigby managed to portray the young Eric Morecambe in a way that was more embodiment than impersonation - occasionally it was a little bit freaky - while Bryan Dick deserves credit for finding the grim application behind Ernie's bland sunniness. Victoria Wood was marvellous as Eric's pushy stage mum; and Vic Reeves (here billed as Jim Moir), who always bore more than a passing resemblance to the adult Morecambe, was an inspired choice to play his dad.

I can't imagine anyone's enjoyment of this being coloured by prior knowledge of the facts, although I can only speak on behalf of the utterly ignorant. The untold story of Morecambe and Wise turns out to be well worth the telling. A clever script illuminated the contrast between the compulsively wise-cracking Eric and the more sober Wise. They were even, when necessary, plausibly funny. I wouldn't go so far as to call this dark, but it was by no means uniformly light-hearted, and the manginess of the postwar variety circuit was nicely evoked, as was the late-50s BBC hierarchy that spawned the pair's first, dismal, and nearly career-terminating small-screen venture, Running Wild. One review contained the line, "Definition of the week: TV set - the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise." Whoever came up with that has a cheek calling anyone else unfunny, but that's a risk TV reviewers occasionally run.