Tom Sutcliffe

Clumsiness can be very funny indeed in the right hands, but there's something about badly simulated incompetence that kills comedy like a sledgehammer to the temple. There were a couple of notable examples yesterday, first in CBBC's new version of Just William (which featured a particularly egregious example of wobbly moped riding).

Just William was a good deal more bearable, coming with the recommendation of Daniel Roche in the title role (he also played the Williamesque younger son in Outnumbered), Simon Nye writing the script and Martin Jarvis doing the voiceover narration, as if they were knowingly passing the baton from one generation of Crompton interpreters to the next. The original stories, remarkably, spanned nearly 50 years of British social history, so you can pretty much take your pick of period. Here they have opted for the Fifties, which can certainly find textual sanction in the canon, but still feels slightly wrong. The world William inhabits - of irate gamekeepers and vicars and tea-parties - is solidly anchored in the Twenties, and begins to look a little hollow and unpersuasive when updated.

That's hardly likely to worry its target audience though, which Nye clearly feels may include a few nostalgic older viewers. The script, perfectly functional when the children were talking, seemed to perk up a little when they disappeared - even finding room for an amorous little exchange between Mr and Mrs Brown. The excellent Rebecca Front plays Mrs Brown and Caroline Quentin takes the role of Mrs Bott, salient here because it was the episode in which William first encounters Violet Elizabeth Bott, a simpering confection of tulle and ringlets with the lockjaw grip of a saltwater crocodile.

For an adult the laughs didn't come from the sight of angry gamekeepers stopped in their tracks by a muddy puddle they could easily step across (more ersatz incompetence), but the sound of Mrs Bott trying to get her aitches in the right place, or the attempted recovery of Mr Brown after he's precipitously answered "yes" to her question "Do I look like a panda?" "It's our favourite of all the bears," he adds placatingly.

Incidentally, I don't know why it's assumed that children have the interpretive equivalent of myopia when it comes to facial expressions, but - with a few honourable exceptions - all the acting here is wildly over-amplified, as it all too often is in comedies for children.

Come Fly with Me, a spoof documentary series from Matt Lucas and David Walliams, was a little unlucky in its timing, following a week or so in which the only airport stories that mattered were about cancellations and flight delays. Quite a few of its potential viewers must have felt sick at the thought of even looking at a terminal building. It needed some luck too, because although it had some good characters there's a coarseness to much of the comedy that matches the unconvincing prosthetic work. Perhaps it's all meant to be cartoonish and obvious, and I'm guessing that Little Britain fans will have a good time. But with all the blacking-up and dragging-up and camping-it-up it sometimes felt as if it had been resuscitated from the Seventies without any modernisation work. Dick Emery would have loved it.

Little Crackers, the title of Sky's specially commissioned comedy shorts, is something of a hostage to fortune, underlining the fact that the snap doesn't work in all of them and the jokes are sometimes a bit duff. But Bill Bailey's "Car Park Babylon" was very satisfying. Bailey played a technologically obsessed loner who finds himself on the receiving end of supernatural punishment, after failing to show sufficient Christmas spirit. This is a fairly standard template for a Christmas tale, I suppose, but the pleasure here came from the agency of his comeuppance, which wasn't some chain-clanking ghoul but a malevolent car park pay station. Having taken his last remaining cash - to the accompaniment of comically extended whirrings and clonks - the machine began to communicate with him through a tiny speaker, talking in ways that suggested Bailey wasn't its first victim. The last shot you saw was the machine in bleak subterranean isolation, the tinny sound of Bailey singing a desperate Christmas carol leaking from its innards.

A premature maternal loss featured in The Giddy Kipper - Victoria Wood's contribution to Little Crackers, Sky's season of short festive dramas, which she'd introduced by saying, "It is - in a lot of ways - my childhood." In fact, Wood's mother didn't die when she was a child, so this account of a solitary little girl excluded from the Sunday school treat by a vindictive teacher can't have been directly autobiographical. It included a lovely moment of fantasy, when winter dark transformed into daylight and the central character found herself briefly reunited with her mother. Touching enough anytime, but particularly poignant if you'd seen Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.

It seems we have Weekend Watchdog to thank for Believe: the Eddie Izzard Story.

Sarah Townsend's intriguing film about the comedian began with a snippy and ill-informed report on the consumer programme, which accused him of recycling material from an old tour. Virtually every minute of the film that followed might have been designed to prove that taking easy shortcuts is the very last thing that Izzard would do. Hurt by the suggestion that he was short-changing his fans, he took a break from stand-up to concentrate on acting; this film both recorded his preparation for his comeback tour and explained how he went from comic no-hoper to the kind of star who can sell out Wembley Arena.

What really wounded Izzard about the charge of recycling was that he'd never made any secret of his working process, which involves ever-wilder excursions from the previous shows. It's a process of evolution, which means that by the end of a tour the material he's using will be completely different to the show he started with. This time round though, sensitive about any suggestion that he was building on old foundations, he effectively began with a pre-tour, popping up in tiny venues in places like Frome to slowly lick the new show into shape. And in between doing that he reminisced about his past, and revisited places that had been important to him.

"Living here was the best part of my life," he said, looking around the Northern Ireland house he'd lived in as a small child. "After that it all went crap." The reason for that was the death of his mother from cancer, after which he and his brother were consigned to a school in Eastbourne, where Izzard rapidly absorbed the most crucial lesson the English boarding system delivers: that it's probably safer to repress the emotions. "I thought, 'Crying equals losing in arguments'. So I didn't cry from then on." Instead, in a classic displacement for the unhappy and vulnerable, he showed off a lot. And when Izzard saw Monty Python he decided to make it big in comedy.

That isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to be able to decide for yourself, but the fascination of Townsend's film lay in its evidence that Izzard - apparently the most insouciantly natural of comedians - had conjured himself into existence by sheer force of will. His phrase for it was "personal nepotism". If no one else would give him a break, he would do it for himself. So, though he could be described as an overnight success, after a single charity gig that really made his name, years of obscurity had led up to that night - on the cobbles of Covent Garden, where he learned to work a crowd round to his way of thinking, and in the rash of comedy clubs that sprang up in London in the Eighties. Izzard would come back to his flat from compering open-mike spots and plot his progress on a map of London, colour-coding what material worked where.

He'd also learned something crucial earlier, after an escapology act went humiliatingly wrong in Covent Garden piazza. "If you think you cannot get out you will not be able to get out," a colleague told him. "You have to believe you can get out." He now seems almost addicted to performance risk; when he felt in control of stand-up he went off to Paris to do his act in a language he could barely speak. It was a disaster, so he plugged away at that, too, and now he can even make Frenchmen laugh. "Why do you want to be a so-so actor when you're a brilliant comedian?" someone asked, just after he'd added that to his to-do list. "Well, once I was a so-so comedian," he replied.

It might all strike you as ruthless - if it wasn't for the man behind it. After one gig in America, a weeping woman dressed as a bee came to the stage door to thank Izzard for bringing her through a recent medical ordeal; she'd been reciting one of his routines as she was wheeled out of the operating room. He reached out and gave her a big hug - which isn't something you can imagine Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle doing. And there's a humanising need behind his drive, too. Towards the end of the film, Townsend filmed him shortly after he'd read some old letters his mother had written, expressing her concern for the boys she knew she was about to leave behind: "Everything I do in life is about trying to get her back," Izzard said with tears in his eyes. Personally, I didn't think we needed "Mama Can You See Me Now" on the soundtrack as Izzard opened at Wembley to press the point home. We got it already. But that misjudgement aside, this was a film that began as a fan's DVD extra and steadily deepened into something far more substantial and moving.

About 10 minutes in, The Morgana Show, a new comedy showcase for Channel 4, was going to get a really terrible review. The opening sketch - a gag about Boris Johnson at prep school - combined a weak impersonation with a silly and unfunny script. The Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minogue take-offs weren't much better and a sketch featuring Gilbert - a teenager with learning difficulties who stars in his own home-made television show - struck me as bullying in its comedy, the kind of television that will go down very well with callow 14-year-olds, but will make life absolute hell for any of their contemporaries unfortunate enough to wear bottle-bottom glasses. But then Morgana released the bully in me by doing a wickedly accurate impression of Fearne Cotton, a presenter who richly deserves all the mockery she can get. And I laughed at the running gag about Lady Gaga, glimpsed doing banal household tasks in wildly improbable costumes. By the end, I even laughed at Gilbert, thanks to the detail of Robinson's performance. But I'm not proud of myself.

Last Night's TV: Fry and Laurie Reunited

A rare and sumptuous treat," promised the makers of Fry and Laurie Reunited at the beginning of Gold's celebration of a comedy double act that (unusually as these things generally go) gave rise to two very successful solo careers.

The Weekend's TV: Psychoville Halloween Special

A Halloween treat from the devilish duo.

The running gag about the hapless middle-ager who's fallen hopelessly in love with the Polish girl at his local café definitely draws on a dynamic in which the humour lies mostly in what isn't said. Laura Solon is syllable-perfect as the contemptuous Pole, and Harry Enfield wonderfully glum as a man who can't give up hoping, despite knowing that things are hopeless. I'm always glad to see the establishing frame which tells you its coming, which isn't always the case in Harry and Paul, an odd mixture of running gags that still have legs and those that have long run their course. It's a question of taste I guess. "Parking Pataweyo", a cod-children's programme built around a Nigerian traffic warden, struck me as being only just funny enough for a one-off, and a recurrent sketch in which two old clubland buffers discuss the sexual orientation of celebrities is so unvarying in its script that even the energy of the comic acting can't revive it. But I can take any amount of the lubricious Italian prime minister or (a genuinely trenchant bit of social satire this) I Saw You Coming, which revolves around the endless gullibility of ladies who lunch. This week the character had gone into the spa business and was offering a novel activity he called "Detoxerboxercize". "I literally beat the crap out of you," he explained. His mark looked momentarily doubtful until he added the magic words: "It's good for releasing toxins."

Last Night's TV: Getting On, BBC4; Harry and Paul, BBC2

A generous dose of the best medicine.