Tom Sutcliffe

To describe Charlie Brooker as biting the hand that feeds him in How TV Ruined Your Life isn't quite right. What actually happened is that television saw him gnashing and snapping away in print like a rabid alsatian, and thought "That looks lively... I wonder if it would be fun to stick a hand in his mouth." And the answer is yes. This week, he was addressing the effect the "flickering fibbing machine" has on our attitudes to romantic love, with its nightly propaganda about soul mates, physical beauty and the proper conduct of a love affair.

Much of the energy came from satirising our illusions about love itself, rather than any telly-induced misconceptions about it. He made a decent case, for example, that chewing gum offers a good metaphor for the trajectory of the average infatuation: "After the initial burst of excitement you soon find yourself just going through the motions, while your interest drains away and then you end up just spitting it into a hankie." But he's also very good at the clichés of television presentation, neatly caught here in a TV news bulletin about the progress of an office romance, presented as if it were an unfolding political story, with an earnest pavement reporter telling the news anchor that "our sources indicate she intends to terminate their 18-month relationship". I'm not sure what Konnie Huq will make of his bleak view of love, but for anyone not married to him it was very entertaining.

The first episode of Charlie Brooker's series How TV Ruined Your Life advanced the proposition that television's preoccupation with disaster and death ("shouting boo in your mind," as he put it) had left us full of delusional fears about the world at large. It was something of a shotgun assault on the medium, ranging from doomy news priorities to public information films, and cutting from real archive clips to pastiches that were good enough to make you do a double-take. But it was very often funny too, particularly when reminding you of 999's appetite for the wilder fringes of human mishap. "Have you ever thought what it would be like to be stuck in the path of a runaway digger?" asked Michael Buerk gravely, with the implicit suggestion that if you hadn't you'd been living in a state of foolish denial about the looming threat of rogue excavators. There was also an excellent parody of a Horizon-style doomwatch programme - "If Pens Got Hot" - which used a global outbreak of ballpoint combustion to mock the Chicken Little aesthetics of such formats.

First Night: 10 O'Clock Live, Channel 4

They had the big stories, but where were the big laughs?

Last Night's TV: Hattie/BBC4

Ruth Jones played Jacques, a piece of casting that on paper may have seemed to make sense physically, but didn't entirely in practice.

On the face of it, Comic's Choice looked as if it was going to be negligibly mediocre. It had the kind of jaunty animated title sequence we've seen a hundred times before, and the pre-broadcast description indicated that it was yet another clip-show, one of those comedians-talking-to-comedians affairs that can occasionally make contemporary broadcasting look like a vast job-creation scheme for underemployed stand-ups. The saving grace here is that one of the comedians (the presenter one) is Bill Bailey. Not only can he play his own signature tune but he's got a manner that somehow makes the format work, which is handy for Channel 4, since it's on every night this week, as a curtain-raiser to the British Comedy Awards this coming weekend.

That's the premise. The British Comedy Awards do flavour of the month, while this short series explores more durable supremacy, with each guest nominating and selecting their best of the best in various categories. Last night, Alan Davies was in the selector's chair, and quickly demonstrated one problem with the structure of the programme, which is that there's no proof in comedy. Davies had nominated Dave Allen as Best Male Comic, on the strength of a live West End performance he once saw. But, of course, there was no clip of that, and even if there had been it may not have made his case for him. It doesn't hugely matter, though, because Bailey is affable and funny enough to fill the gaps - on great form last night pretending to sulk about one of Davies's other nominations, the "sexy little jazz weasel" Noel Fielding, who once bumped him off a captain's slot on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Last Night's TV - David Walliams' Awfully Good, C4

He's got to be having a laugh.

I hate that title card which tells you that while a drama is based on a true story, some details have been changed for "dramatic effect". What it means, essentially, is that real life wasn't felt to be exciting enough and it always leaves you wondering about the status of what you're watching. Something of a tribute, then, to Peter Bowker's script (and to an excellent cast) that thoughts of authenticity evaporated fairly quickly as you watched Eric and Ernie, his account of the early career of one of Britain's best loved double-acts.

Bowker's drama was actually a three-hander: Eric's mother, Sadie, didn't get title billing, but turned out to be the core of the thing, a woman whose determination to get her son into showbiz overrode his own indifference. "Never mind, son," Eric's father consoled him as he returned from a talent contest brandishing the winner's trophy, "'Appen you'll lose next time." In that exchange you got a sense of an ordinary boy helplessly caught up in someone else's ambitions; for Sadie, though, this wasn't a career by proxy but simple maternal concern: "You make people laugh," she told her reluctant star, "you're a lovely dancer and you can hold a tune... but more than that - and I mean this as the mother that carried you and bore you and raised you - you aren't any good at anything else." She saw that it was showbiz or nothing.

The partnership with Ernie began in rivalry (fighting over the blankets in a reluctantly shared bed) and then mellowed into a friendship, occasionally tinged with envy or resentment but only suffering one long rift, after their first disastrous foray into television, which was played here as a capitulation to metropolitan arrogance and a betrayal of their own comic instinct, painfully developed on a music-hall circuit of grotty digs and merciless audiences. A betrayal, too, of Sadie, whose shrewd advice was temporarily set aside. In total, six performers played Eric and Ernie, and not one of them let the others down - though the Erics, in the drama as in the original act, seemed to have a lot more fun.

Navel-gazing comedy series starring Matt LeBlanc as himself, about a British sitcom-writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) and the humiliations they endure when the show is remade for American television. Written by David Crane (Friends) and co-produced with Showtime in America, it sounds like a recipe for disaster but is actually very funny.

David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr, Charlie Brooker and Lauren Laverne team up to produce a live, topical "comedy and current affairs" show. Think Newsnight with a steady laugh-track. Adrian Chiles is doing something similar for ITV in That Sunday Night Show but this is probably the one to watch.

A six-part series from Charlie Brooker, exploring the fairground mirror British television holds up to reality, and how misguided it can be to treat the images you see on screen as a decent likeness.