Tim Vine

Back for a well-deserved fifth series, Lee Mack and his co-stars are set to give your jaws another high intensity workout with an episode that packs so many laughs into each minute, the EU should probably slap a health warning on it.

All I need tell you about this week's episode is that Tim (Tim Vine) has joined a rock band - a concept so horrible and unlikely that it needs to be seen with your own eyes.

Lee's jealous that the guitarist fancies Lucy and has even written a song for her, but he's written a few lyrics of his own, too.

You know that gorgeous love song on Britain's Got Talent recently?

Lee's is even better than that. Why? Well, this one rhymes Lucy with Zanussi.

Friday nights are Lee Mack night, with Would I Lie to You? and the return of this endearingly silly sitcom, an unashamedly old-fashioned half-hour of daft gags, smut, wisecracks and wordplay. Mack plays a version of himself, the world's worst flatmate, Lee: an ageing slacker who's in (undeclared) love with his comely landlady, Lucy (Sally Bretton).

Lucy's dull financial adviser brother Tim (Tim Vine) has joined a rock band, the Auditors, and his supporters are out in force. But his onstage banter is painful, leading Lee to observe: "Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Alice Cooper is advising someone about the advantages of a cash ISA."

It's the new series of Lee Mack's pun-tastic, guilty pleasure sitcom. And there are a few improvements: Lucy, the put-upon landlady who is forever the apple of Lee's eye, has had her edges softened; and Katy Wix is given better material to work with as Tim Vine's dappy girlfriend. To kick off, Vine looks endearingly ridiculous as he decides to join a band.

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Being modern: Arena comedy

Lee Evans, Steve Coogan, Dylan Moran, Eddie Izzard, Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Tim Vine, Michael McIntyre... the very best of our home-grown talent has since filled the O2 Arena, the very biggest of our coliseums - and McIntyre has made playing to these rooms an expected practice rather than a remarkable event thanks to his televised "roadshows". Fewer than 100,000 arena-comedy tickets were sold in 2004; within five years, that figure had breached a million.

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Ardal O'Hanlon is on good form as the headline act at Dublin's Olympia Theatre, his saucer-eyed wonder undercut by a surreal streak. Supporting him on this trip back to his local theatre are Gary Delaney (a one-liner machine in the same vein as Milton Jones and Tim Vine) and the whimsical Josie Long.

Of the two, Long is the more appealing performer, with her diatribe on The Sun's Page Three girls being particularly well executed. Delaney is perhaps someone more to admire than like - you can't help but be in awe of someone who remembers so many gags, although the fact that he finds his own material quite so amusing does start to grate.

An interview with Tim Vine

The King of the Puns tells Spoonfed about his new Edinburgh Fringe chat show...