Tim Dowling

TV review: Being Ronnie Corbett

Being Ronnie Corbett was essentially an advert for The One Ronnie, a Christmas Day sketch show special.

DOA (BBC3) is a new comedy about ambulance drivers, starring Kris Marshall, the guy from that series of BT ads. One imagines he's been looking for an exit strategy for some time now. Could this be it?

It got off to a cracking start, with Marshall playing Tom, a junior doctor who's been downgraded to paramedic while awaiting a decision about a malpractice case ("You're the guy who took out the wrong lung," said a colleague). He's partnered with driver Julie, who sells sex toys from the back of the ambulance, and their first patient was a man who'd had his fingers bitten off by a pet alligator. It's quite funny, deeply gory and more than a little in love with its own sense of transgression. Each new character was more irredeemable than the last, and the whole thing was quickly swamped in blood-drenched, vomit-flecked excess. I've got no problem with DOA being in questionable taste - I am myself a man of questionable tastes - but I have no idea where they go from here. They used up a season's worth of fake barf in one go.

The very idea of a new sitcom on BBC2 makes my heart sink a little - all that British comic talent ploughing through a script in search of a gag - but it's probably best to start with low expectations. That way, when a programme like Whites comes along, one may be pleasantly surprised.

Given that it's set in the chaotic, high-pressure world of the restaurant kitchen, Whites is a surprisingly even-tempered thing. It stars Alan Davies as a self-absorbed executive chef at a country house hotel (he looks the part; in fact he looks exactly like Marco Pierre White), Darren Boyd as his demoralised sous chef and The IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson as the catty front-of-house. There's a clumsy kitchen worker who spills things all the time, but there's also a creepy, ambitious agency cook named Skoose who adds some genuine menace. Whites occupies territory somewhere between dinnerladies and Peep Show (which I accept isn't much help to anyone trying to find it on a comedy map). Peep Show's Isy Suttie and Matt King (who co-wrote this) even turn up, as a hapless waitress and a dodgy meat supplier (he's dodgy, not the meat; not so far, anyway).

If it sounds surreal, inventive, original and hilarious then I'm over- selling it. It's gentle, subtly played, often funny and quite promising. At times it got a bit predictable, but I blame the leisurely pace, which sometimes allowed the viewer to catch up with the joke, and occasionally overtake it. In last night's episode the best laughs belonged to the minor characters, especially Isy Suttie's Kiki, who is kind, thoughtful and at least a half a bubble off plumb. "I remember my first day," she tells evil new boy Skoose. "I needed the loo but I was too scared to asked where it was, so I ended up going behind a gravestone in the chapel out back, and I thought I saw a ghost but it was just wee steam."

My main criticism of Whites is that it doesn't actually offer much new insight into the workings of a restaurant kitchen. Perhaps I've sat through too many episodes of Masterchef: the Professionals to be surprised, or even curious. Even the menu struck me as being a little tame. Comedy's one thing, but this show needs to take the cooking to the next level.

The "roast" is an odd American phenomenon, a sort of testimonial showbiz party during which the guest of honour is mercilessly insulted by fellow celebrities. The tradition began at the Friars Club in New York and was televised as part of The Dean Martin Show in the 1970s, and more recently on Comedy Central. Now Channel 4 is bringing us a British version, Comedy Roast, with Bruce Forsyth as last night's inaugural dishonoree. Jimmy Carr, Jonathan Ross, Jon Culshaw and Jack Dee were among his genial tormentors - a "Who's Who of who was available," as Carr said. It looks as if they went through the Js of some publicist's email address book.

There's a problem with insulting Brucie: it's hard to get beyond his age. "When the dinosaurs died out he was taken in for questioning," said someone. "He's seen Halley's comet three times," said someone else. A lot of the jokes overlapped. Variations on "Nice to see you, to see you nice" abounded. Jonathan Ross said "fuck" a couple of times, but the whole thing lacked the sleazy exuberance of the original format (you can watch the Dean Martin ones on YouTube). Only Bruce himself seemed to catch the spirit of the thing. "That was funny," he shouted at Jack Dee. "I knew you'd make me laugh eventually."

Off the Hook (BBC3) was always going to suffer in comparison with The Inbetweeners. It's hard not to see it as a sedate university-days version of the boisterous schooldays sitcom, not least because the two shows share an actor in basin-faced James Buckley. Indeed, the former distinguishes itself from the latter by being nowhere near as good. In place of the exuberant puerility of The Inbetweeners, Off the Hook offers stock characters, lame gags and a very tame take on freshman year. It's odd that the show about the older kids is the more bowdlerised and less well observed, but when you hear it's been scaled up from a series of five-minute internet shorts, it sort of makes sense.

Recently my son came up to my office with a laptop to show me a clip from what he described as "the world's funniest show". He was referring to Would I Lie to You?. This may or may not surprise you, depending on your understanding of what the average 11-year-old boy finds funny.

Having watched last night's instalment, my own professional opinion (I was recently criticised for having no TV-reviewing qualifications, but I have since started a night course) is that Would I Lie to You? is some way off being the world's funniest show, but is still pretty funny. How the game works is not important. It's been a long time since the rules of any panel show mattered, because there isn't anything at stake - not even pride. This one is basically just an opportunity for comedians to insult each other.

And that's a pretty reliable formula, because even if you don't like a particular comedian (lots of people don't like Jimmy Carr, for example), you'll enjoy the bits where everyone takes the piss out of him. Last night's panel consisted of four funny guys and Terry Christian. And Jamelia, who also isn't funny, except in the sense that she's funnier than Terry Christian. But we can all put that on our CVs.

The highlight for me was the deeply improbable claim that Marcus Brigstocke was once a podium dancer at the Ministry of Sound, during weeks off from his other job working on an oil rig. This turns out to be completely true. "So Flashdance is actually based on your life," said Jimmy Carr. I think that's funny. Sue me.

Last night's TV: Krod Mandoon

Krod Mandoon featured a dungeon full of prisoners - which is where its scriptwriter belongs.

Satirising the middle classes on telly also has its inherent difficulties. To a large extent, your target and your audience are one and the same; who else would be interested? There's always a danger of resorting to wide-of-the-mark caricature, but if you're too subtle you run the risk of being insufficiently savage. And aren't traditional middle-class preoccupations simply too dreary to warrant a full-scale comic assault? Good schools, lamb shanks, house prices - who cares?

May Contain Nuts (ITV1) neatly bypasses these worries by dragging us into a dark, claustrophobic world: a gated community in London ruled by pushy mother Ffion, who is a sort of Lord Voldemort of middle-class aspiration. Fresh arrivals David and Alice Chapin are initially bewildered by their new social circle, where ghastly parents deploy their children as proxies for their own ambitions; but, rather than becoming channels for our disapproval, the Chapins plunge right in.