Tom Sutcliffe

It doesn't happen very often that we invent new ways of laughing at ourselves, but I think you could make a case that the awkward silence is a peculiarly contemporary mode of comedy. It's not that you can't find any antique instances of the humour of speechless embarrassment. It's just that it's only recently become one of the standard forms for which a sitcom can reach. It has its own associated visual style - that of hand-held documentary realism - and carries its own implication, which is that any programme that employs it is operating in that fertile (and upmarket) borderland between sitcom and drama. And Getting On - Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's comedy about life on a geriatric ward - is a perfect example. It even has one of the style's most characteristic markers: a signature tune that is ostentatiously melancholy and distinctly retro (in this case Richard Hawley's "Roll River Roll"). Where a traditional sitcom tune would unleash the bassoons and brass and try to parp you into hilarity, this kind of theme song gives you permission to laugh ruefully - which will sometimes mean not laughing at all, but simply adopting an expression which sits somewhere between a grin and a wince.

None of this is meant to imply that Getting On is anything but excellent, only that it follows the trail blazed by a comedy like The Office, where the punchline often lay in the fact that a character couldn't think of what to say next and the dialogue dribbled to an excruciating halt. There was a textbook example here, in a scene where Pepperdine's odiously brisk Doctor Moore was sparring with a patient's relative over a course of treatment. Why isn't she being given Drug X, asks the anxious relative. Because it's not an appropriate drug at this point and I will make the clinical decisions, replies Doctor Moore, professional affront expanding like a lizard's neck ruff. Drug X is quite unsuitable for her current condition, she insists pompously. At which point, Sister Den (Scanlan) interjects to point out that the patient is actually being given Drug X and the scene ends in stammering damage limitation. Getting On is full of such embarrassments, beautifully acted and excruciatingly awkward.

There are more straightforward writing pleasures, too, last night mostly centring on a homeless patient with a perianal abscess, who arrives accompanied by an odour strong enough to discolour the curtains. "It's a kind of every-orifice cocktail," gasps Nurse Kim (Brand), blinking in the fumes as they undress her. "Can we just stop there and get used to that layer?" Then she pauses, distracted by a moment of nostalgia when it turns out that one of the patient's undergarments is a sheet of tabloid newspaper describing Dirty Den's webcam sex scandal (a story that broke in 2004). And if that sounds cruel, it wasn't - just an entirely plausible blend of black humour and grim reality, delivered with a fine grasp of understatement. Sometimes it's a beat or two before you even notice that a joke has been made.

First Night: The Graham Norton Show, BBC1

Relief at the BBC as Norton plays it safe in Ross's shoes.

Last Night's TV - Whites, BBC2

One-liners that whet the appetite.

This review contains spoilers...

Albert's Memorial looked initially like an old geezer's comic road movie, enlivened with that invaluable prop for farce - a dead body. Then it darkened into something quite sombre with the revelation that the unresolved secret all three men had carried with them since the war involved their failure to save a young woman from a violent death at the hands of Russian soldiers. And then it squandered the respect it had earned for its daring by adding a preposterous and entirely wishful supernatural ending, with the revelation that the enigmatic hitchhiker the two men had picked up while crossing the Channel was in fact the dead girl's spirit, returned to absolve them of their guilt. I had been planning to make a mild note of protest at the plot's dependence on coincidence, but in the light of that later twist it seems a bit pointless.

My Funniest Year may well give you the longest night of yours, though in putting this two-hour programme on at 10 at night, Channel 4 is clearly hoping that alcohol will already have done its bit to erode our judgement. It's classic slump television, the sort of thing you watch because there's nothing else on and your volition is lying on the floor somewhere, underneath a pizza box. The concept is insultingly lazy. Hire a comedian to stitch together a clip show along the lines of I Love the 80s, but take the word "love" out of the title so that he or she can slag everything off. This week it was Rufus Hound reading the autocue - a gamily flavoured comedian at the best of times, but one who can be funny in the right setting. He wasn't here, rarely rising above the level of pub abuse. The lines followed a formula: mention event from 2000, think of feebly insulting metaphor, try and stiffen it up with a heavily stressed vulgarity. Thus: "That river of fire looked like the funeral of the world's shittest Viking", "Castaway was like a microcosm of an island full of dicks" and Heather Mills described as "always on the hunt for treasure like a Long John Silver with tits". Fortunately for him, the year in question contained two moments that proved television can sink lower than this - Rebecca Loos manually pleasuring a pig and Richard Blackwood evacuating his bowels on camera. Alongside those clips, My Funniest Year looked almost classy.

The Weekend's TV: The Very Last of the Summer Wine

Hardly a vintage ending.

In Roger and Val Have Just Got In, Val came back from work with three noodle bakes, two more than she could fit into her refrigerator, which is what passes for a plot highlight in Beth and Emma Kilcoyne's daringly understated comedy. It's something of a noodle bake itself, this series: looping strands of domestic wittering and bickering in a sauce of beautifully cooked blandness, not exactly a showy dish, but reassuring and comforting in its ordinariness. I could quote lines at you all day without being able to make a convincing case for it, because it's all about context and the recognisability of the moment. As Roger and Val, Alfred Molina and Dawn French underplay it beautifully, commiserating with each other about the day's minor setbacks (11 dead rice plants for Roger, who works as a botanist at the Winter Gardens, and feels about exotic flora as Martin Clunes does about Chester) and never talking about the big drama in their life - the death of a child, the illness of a parent - things that you glimpse as if out of the corner of your eye in passing. The programme takes half an hour to go nowhere, but it's those unmentioned griefs that make it work. It's just how life goes on, quite substantial portions of it sustained by gentle self-deception and the magnification of stuff that doesn't really matter.

Bob, the central character in Kevin Cecil's comedy The Great Outdoors, also uses his hobby to compensate for a less than enlivening day-job but has chosen a pastime in which the greatest danger is getting a nasty blister. Bob is determined to make his group into the biggest rambling club in the Chilterns, his ambitions hampered only by the fact that he's so awful he keeps driving the new members away. Some of them falter in the face of Bob's terrible jokes. Others fall by the wayside because they don't care for the fact that he dictates the conversational topics mile by mile ("OK, mile one topic... Dinner with a Beatle. Living or dead, which wife and what's the menu!"). He has one unquestioning lieutenant, Tom, and one insurrectionary one in the form of his daughter.

Bob was funny but not entirely convincing, because his lines sometimes represented him as witlessly ghastly and at other moments gave him the tart wit of a far more knowing character. "In Barnstaple, we were always prepared for the worst," said new arrival Christine, who invariably cites her previous rambling club as the perfect model of how things should be done. "You had the worst," replied Bob, "because you were in Barnstaple," which seemed to be a joke with sharper reflexes than we'd come to expect from him. A little later - also quite funnily - he was excitedly exploring a loophole in a gastro-pub's special offer ("I have discovered the secret of infinite puddings!") although this is a joke that will only really work if we think of him as an utter fool. The discrepancy may not matter in the long run because Cecil's writing can spring deceptively quiet gags on you - such as Tom's guileless explanation of his current situation: "I've been out of work before but I really want to make a go of it this time." Worth tagging along for the next mile or so, I'd say.

I'm not convinced that Odd One In is going to do much for ITV's viewing figures. Bradley Wiggins hosts a comedy game show, involving a lot of noisy orchestral brass accents and flashing blue and red lights (are they an Ofcom requirement for game shows?). The idea is that the panel identify the genuine eccentric or oddity in a line-up of fakes, an exercise which - like the similar section in Never Mind the Buzzcocks - offers a modest opportunity for comic improvisation ("Have you ever smuggled children out of Austria in wartime," one panellist asked one of a line-up of nuns, in an attempt to identify the real thing from the forgeries). The audience in the studio can take part by means of electronic handsets and the one who performs best gets the chance to go up on stage and win £5,000, once the celebrities have finished. Unfortunately, the creators of the format have neglected to come up with any kind of incentive that might persuade the audience at home to stick around till the end.

The Weekend's TV: Pete and Dud, Lee Nelson

They've got to be having a laugh.