Tim Teeman

Once upon a time, before she became a comedian, Jo Brand was a psychiatric nurse. Now she stars as a nurse in an old people's ward in Getting On, a comedy with a resolutely dark heart. It was directed by Peter Capaldi and the hand-held camera, jitteringly close to the action and people's responses, reinforced the same uneasy, quease-making intimacy the technique also gave to The Thick of It, in which Capaldi played the foul-mouthed spin chief Malcolm Tucker.

Just as The Thick of It exposed political corruption, Getting On revealed the daily reality of cutbacks and petty bureaucracy now blighting the NHS. A turd sat on a chair for almost the entire duration of the show, first because a specialist turd-removing medi-testing outsourced company needed to clear it, and only then because the turd was being used as part of a vital research exercise to secure funding for the hospital. The staff struggled and failed to understand a woman speaking in a foreign accent. There were piercing notes to the character portraits: the ward sister was neurotic and ineffectual but also heartbroken. For all her dead-eyed scorn of her seniors, Brand seemed nice about the patients, until she ate the cake belonging to one dead old woman. She also lifted her family pack of Starburst.

As openings go, Psychoville's was near perfect. A quill scratched over paper, a guttering candle flickered in the darkness. Then suddenly all was light. The candle was on a post office counter. A figure shrouded in black swept out, and a stout lady in the queue pursed her lips. "'E's left his candle," she said to another lady.

The slick genius of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's new comedy was that it didn't feel like the first episode of anything: indeed its gallery of grotesques seemed immediately very familiar. Were they benefiting from our foreknowledge of their previous opus, The League of Gentlemen? Here too are a monstrous set of characters, ghouls made flesh and plonked in the everyday, and they are all linked (as yet we don't know how) by a letter each receives which reads menacingly that the sender knows what he or she did.

Dawn French as the deranged ante-natal nurse who treats her doll baby as if it was real was particularly compelling. The scary children's entertainer, Mr Jelly, comes with a hook hand and is terrifying. He's not, he says emphatically, Mr Jolly and scares a group of children into screaming fear. When the parents nervously inquire if he really is a children's entertainer, he growls, "No, I'm Harold Shipman." In a production of Snow White, a dwarf actor falls for the leading lady and receives the benevolent counsel of the leading man, without realising that they spend their downtime laughing at him in the porn video he once made. But he has a rather violent capacity for telekinesis...

In a gloomy mansion, a shadowy figure called Mr Lomax intrigues "Tealeaf", the young man sent round to help him. The strangest relationship is between a mother and son, incestuously attracted to each other (she scrapes his back and tucks him in just a second too long), which is quite dark enough without the delicious twist that he seems to be ready to start acting out his obsession with serial killers.

Pemberton and Shearsmith's characters hum with a deranged vitality. The humour is dark, irreverent and vicious - yet warm and affectionate too. The characters are freaks, but we care about them. The mysterious figure in black reminds me of the Phantom Flan Flinger in Tiswas.

Using the same denouement measurement, the mess of the ending of May Contain Nuts - after such a brilliant start - showed what a parlous waste of time it had become. The nice parents who cheated to get their daughter into a good school (mother sat an entrance exam as her daughter, below) renounced their snobbishness. The really snobby mother (Elizabeth Berrington, the only compelling actor on screen) got a telling-off for her attitudes. But bizarrely the racism at the heart of the drama was never directly addressed, although those that practised it were shown to be idiots. This satire on competitive middle-class parenting was blunted by a script that descended into dumb farce and screechy over-acting that descended far lower than that.

There was more time-travelling drag in Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a sword and sorcery comedy that doesn't quite know what speed to be set at. It's funny, then not, funny, then not, like a car stuttering into life, then packing up. The shtick is that Matt Lucas plays a bad Sheriff of Nottingham type in the Middle Ages, Sean Maguire the hero out to ruin his despot-ery, aided by a gang of outlaws all with modern-seeming foibles.

Maguire's love interest is a pagan who delights in her sluttery. He has a magician who can't do magic and talks in sassy street talk. He has a patrician guardian who dies, and whose lover is a camp, sex-obsessed Spanish guy. Maguire is vain and confused. Lucas has lots of fun rolling his "r"s villainously. It's not terrible or pointless, but there were as many clouds as patches of sunshine. A lot of the jokes are physical (the pagan woman can't stop body-flipping) or based on deliberate comic mis-timing, with people looking askance after someone else says something silly. It tumbled along and then it was gone, a frippery - neither offensively bad, nor resoundingly funny.

The third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look revealed that David Mitchell and Robert Webb can flit more deftly than Matt Lucas between comedy series (Peep Show) and sketch show. The first of the sketches encapsulated Mitchell and Webb's grasp of comic brevity: it gently satirised the conventions of a Poirot mystery. As their unmasking approached, the killer suddenly acquired a villainous voice and cigarette holder. The duo also made a very funny joke out of that thing we do when looking around the house for something, patting both our pockets as we rock on our knees.

Best of all was a satire of The Apprentice, which had the duo as TV executives watching a tape of a show featuring a relatively meek CEO - a Sugar-lite - dismissing a contestant politely and apologetically. But it didn't quite work, the executives thought, and so rethought the concept. "We deliberately pick 16 idiots - real idiots, arseholes as well," one of the men said, "and then we watch them screw everything up." But honestly, who would want to watch that?

Is Al Murray's gay Nazi homophobic?

Homophobia, gay stereotypes, anti-gay humour and backchat - unlike racism and sexism - has become acceptable. It isn't.

Next week national comedy treasures, Gavin & Stacey wunderkinds James Corden and Mathew Horne, serve up a gay war reporter played by Horne, who greets viewers with a "Hiya", notes that the war "is mental, it's all going off", that it looks like "we're winning", that he's about to go and do karaoke outside Fallujah, our boys are being "well looked after", and then the camp, screechy signoff: "Don't do anyone I wouldn't do.";

In another sketch, mocking a fashion advertisement, the two men breathily enter a near-naked embrace. They open their lips to kiss. The screen freezes. No kiss. They can mock the idea of gay romance, but no tongues. That would be too 'gay'. Imagine the justifiable outrage if blacks or Asians or women were treated so insultingly on TV now. But homophobia, gay stereotypes, anti-gay humour and backchat - unlike racism and sexism - has become acceptable. It isn't.

British TV comedy is more and more influenced by the fast, gag-rich American model; no bad thing (it's great to have Frasier and Will & Grace in the mornings). FM is set in an indie radio station and features a DJ who's uncool, his spiky producer and a potty-mouthed sidekick who was once in a boyband and desperate to regain his glory.

The writers Ian Curtis and Oliver Lansley cleverly parlayed dirty and silly jokes while somehow convincing Guillemots and Marianne Faithfull to get involved. The producer thought her boyfriend was boring and was about to dump him when she discovered Faithfull was his mother. Too late: she got dumped. The comedy of losers is a British speciality: FM skilfully continues the tradition.

The Times Review

Our hero was brainy and cranky and the show itself awkward, funny and idiosyncratic (as you'd expect from the creator, writer and director David Renwick). If you were looking out for it, there was even an attempt at profundity: something about having to choose between the present and posterity.

The Times Review

In Ponderland Russell Brand proves how very funny he is. The idea is that he riffs on topics in that Brand kind of a way that makes no sense written down. His jokes are not quotable, not because they are profane, but because they are a stream of mucky consciousness and absurdity.