Tom Sutcliffe

I'm Pete again, aren't I?" said Angus Deayton, during one of the bits of rehearsal actuality that filled out Pete and Dud: the Lost Sketches. You wish, Angus. You wish. Actually, you're Angus Deayton, which is fine as far as it goes, but still leaves a slightly conspicuous gap between towering comic genius and jobbing comedy actor.

It's a gap that would generally pass unremarked, but for the fact that Deayton, and several other contemporary comedians, had accepted the BBC's invitation to restage some Not Only... But Also sketches that the corporation, in a more careless time, had managed to wipe. If the title got you all excited at the thought that someone had found a dusty spool of film in their attic and we were going to see the real thing you will have been disappointed. This was a tribute-band celebration of Pete and Dud, rather as if someone had accidentally destroyed the acetates of St Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 40-odd years ago, and they'd called in Jedward and Susan Boyle to reconstruct it from sheet music.

That analogy may be a little harsh, perhaps, but the show - one of the last things Jonathan Ross will front up for the BBC before he heads off to ITV - was an odd affair, clumsily blending the preparation for the show with a live-audience studio section in which the assembled players were introduced to do the greatest hits. Most of them, wisely, had decided not emulate the original delivery, not exactly inimitable - since the accents and manner almost instantly fed into every playground and student bar in Britain - but not easy to imitate well. That meant, though, that the focus necessarily shifted to the writing - the lines being the only residue of the original. Some of it stood up well. In one of the more famous "Dagenham dialogues", in which Pete tries to take Dud through rebirthing therapy, you could catch the authentic flavour of Peter Cook's imagination. When Dud protests at the idea that he wants to get back to his mother's womb, Pete is quick to clarify matters: "I'm not suggesting that you go around now to 465 Beckingtree Avenue and ask your mother for re-admission," he says, "It's four o'clock in the morning... and anyway it's illegal."

But in other sketches the raw words were left looking a little thin and you realised how important the volatile elements of a comedy partnership can be - the intangible stuff (including all the corpsing) - which they added to the printed words and which can only be captured by a recording. Some of the restagings here were frankly embarrassing, carrying the stale whiff of a thousand am-dram revues in which devoted fans vainly attempt to get lightning to strike twice. It was a reminder of just how good the originals could be, but not perhaps in quite the way that was first intended. "The BBC has wiped these tapes now... is that a big loss?" Jonathan Ross asked someone lamely at one point. Well if they hadn't we might have been spared this, which would have been something.

...I can't see much evidence that Pete and Dud have influenced the creator of Lee Nelson's Well Good Show, though it's abundantly clear that Ali G should be paying some form of child support, since Lee's persona, a breezily amoral Sarf London scally, owes quite a lot to Sacha Baron Cohen's invention. When he's working the studio audience, Taylor can be funny and fast on his feet, offering examples of his chat-up style to a pretty girl on the front row ("You're the best-looking girl I've ever seen... in your category") and protesting at his social worker's suggestion that he's implicated in his six-year- old son's behaviour problems ("How could it be my fault for fuck's sake... I'm hardly ever there!"). The sketch material is a bit more uneven though. He has an entertainingly dim Premier League footballer called Jason Bent ("Yeah... footballers do get paid more than the average wage... But without footballers the average wage would be a lot lower, so we're actually doing people a favour"), but the foreign doctor gag is Chuckle Brothers stuff. He needs a Dud to help him carry the weight.

Reunited couldn't more conspicuously have been a pilot if it had been wearing flying goggles and a leather helmet, but for some reason nobody seemed to want to mention the fact. Mike Bullen's script about student housemates meeting up again after eight years was described in the Radio Times as a "comedy drama", which rather suggested that within the hour Mike Bullen would have tied up at least one of the mop-head of loose ends he'd assembled. But as tick followed tock it dawned on you that Hannah's agony over whether Martin still loved her or Belinda's guilty secret about "Spanish lessons" or Rob's odd-couple affair with the judgemental Fran were not going to get any firm resolution before the final credits rolled, and you lost your only remaining motive for watching. It was a bit like being told a shaggy dog story only to have the teller smile enigmatically at the end and say he might deliver the punchline in eight months' time, provided the overnights turned out to be good enough.

I'm not keeping my fingers crossed myself, because this looked like a parody of Cold Feet-style drama, rather than a fresh product by the man who helped create it. In fact, what it really looked like was one of those narrative adverts that take their inspiration from Cold Feet-style drama, a Gold Blend world in which every line is silkily knowing, or involves embarrassment as well rehearsed as a dance routine. It had the same commercial compression in the storytelling, so that when Martin (on the brink of marriage and still nursing a grievance over a now ancient infidelity) spotted his old flame in the pub he froze in the doorway and a little shimmer on the soundtrack did the emotional shorthand for you in about two seconds flat, no characterisation required.

This was an ensemble affair though, so Gold Blend won't quite cover it. Before long, a Magners cider gang turned up, perky in their backchat, up for fun, breaking off for bits of man-hugging and girlish giggling. Hannah was at the centre of it, but there were other storylines circling: needy Sarah, who announced that she'd found Jesus and Belinda and Danny, who were three children into a marriage and - on her side at least - beginning to get twitchy about it. And then there was Rob, a serious miscalculation by the likeable Irish comedian Ed Byrne, who had somehow been persuaded to take on the role of Rob, the feckless, notionally "charming" one. "If you still want to punch me I'd understand," he said perkily, when he met Martin in the loo (it was Rob who slept with Hannah when he shouldn't have). Martin declined, but I'd have been more than happy to do it for him if I'd been on the spot.

Men about the House purported to be a contribution to BBC4's Fatherhood strand and made very little sense indeed. One of those clip-show social histories, it was notionally a survey of how sitcoms had reflected attitudes to fathers over the last few decades. If you thought this might imply the presence of children you were only half right. The first two examples were Albert Steptoe and Alf Garnett, both of them fathers, it's true, but the stars of shows that were less about fatherhood than generational friction. The historian Dominic Sandbrook was allowed to point out that Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em was about slapstick not fatherhood, but then they tried to rope it in to the thesis anyway, as they did with Reginald Perrin, a comedy about almost anything but fatherhood.

Perversely, the programme made you wonder why fatherhood had been so marginal a subject in British comedy - one answer to that question being bluntly practical. Most child actors have the comic timing of a talking clock and even the few that don't are hedged in by child-protection legislation, making filming a nightmare. You either have to leave the children out entirely - as Marion & Geoff brilliantly did, or find a different way of working with them, as Outnumbered worked out, though significantly that comedy, one of very few you can think of that directly addresses the aggravations and absurdity of modern fatherhood, wasn't even mentioned here, even though it found room to squeeze in Father Ted. If you have to rewrite history because you can't get the clips clearance, then perhaps it isn't worth writing the history at all.

There can't be many sitcom characters as lovably innocent as Moss, the bespectacled nerd in The IT Crowd.

The problem is that innocence so easily shades over into stupidity and then our affection becomes a different, compromised thing. Bubbles, the dimwitted PA in Absolutely Fabulous, was lovable, I guess, but part of what we loved about her was her unerring ability to grasp the wrong end of the stick. Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do Ave 'Em was also lovable in his way, but there was a whisper of contempt somewhere in the mix. In both cases, we fondly felt our superiority enlarged by their cluelessness. Moss, though, is significantly different. We're still laughing at him, rather than with him most of the time; but it's not because he's stupid exactly, just that his intelligence operates in a world several degrees to the left of the one the rest of us are in. There's something touching about how unbesmirched he is, so that even jokes about his sexual inexperience confirm his standing as a holy fool. I love him anyway - and feel more cheerful as soon as I see his face.

He was on good form in the first of the new series of Graham Linehan's comedy, sweetly attempting to be knowing and manly in order to help Roy through a bad relationship breakup, but flubbing it hopelessly because pretence of any kind is quite beyond him: "Women, eh!" he said, adopting his own weird version of a laddish posture, "Can't live with them... Can't find them sometimes". And whereas both Roy and Jen are funny in ways that you can imagine inserted into more conventional (and lesser) comedies, Moss could only really exist here. He is, in Linehan's script and Richard Ayoade's brilliantly naïve delivery, a unique comic creation. It isn't easy to back this up with evidence, to be honest. There are quotably funny lines in The IT Crowd (such as the boorish executive who is grievously disappointed to find that The Vagina Monologues isn't a sex show: "You get there and it's just women talking... it's false advertising!"). But far more often, the laughs sit in the junction between dialogue and expression. I can't think of any way to effectively paraphrase the long and delightful sequence in which Moss employs a game of Dungeons & Dragons as emotional therapy, since most of it consisted of jokes not being made and the absurdity simply being relished. But it was very funny.

A broad survey of how television has portrayed and reflected disability, Kate Monaghan's programme began in an age when there was still something called the Central Council for the Care of Cripples and ended (roughly) with Channel 4's Cast Offs, a drama presented as having got pretty much everything right. Well, perhaps, but I'm willing to bet that if somebody makes another survey documentary in 40 years' time, its attitude to the disabled may look appallingly out of touch. Good intentions in these matters rarely exempt you from the disapproval of posterity. When Crossroads included a character in a wheelchair - the gravel-voiced Sandy - they probably felt they were striking a virtuous blow for visibility. Now all we can see is the transparency of the gambit and the fact that the actor was, as Matt Fraser trenchantly put it, "spazzing up". Even today, the nuances are tricky. BBC News got a bit of a hard time here for the self-congratulatory display of Frank Gardiner's wheelchair, though one imagines everyone present would have been even crosser if it had been hidden away. And the pieties about never laughing at disability, but only at attitudes to it, can't be relied on either, since more than one of the disabled performers here made the point that being exempted from ridicule was just as much a discrimination as being singled out for it.

The Weekend's TV: The IT Crowd & Are You Having a Laugh

A tech team with real application

Mongrels has been described as a puppet show for adults - a worrying phrase, less for the "puppets" bit than the word "adult", which usually means exactly the opposite. It's a kind of soft-toy sitcom, centred on a group of inner-city animals, which include Marion (an overweight cat with an accent who wanders around the southern Mediterranean), a ghetto-talking pigeon and a sensitive fox called Nelson, who has problems with confrontation. The "adult" bit turns out to mean swear words and a slightly strained determination not to play safe with the comedy. There were jokes here about Christopher Reeve's accident, Harold Shipman and the discovery of Anne Frank by German troops (she's exposed because she shouts "Yahtzee" at the wrong moment). It does have its laughs, though, because the script isn't entirely about crass shock value. Last night's episode, for example, featured a Romeo and Juliet storyline in which Nelson the fox fell in love with a chicken (they'd both been economical with the truth on an online dating site). "There's a Nando's around the corner," he suggested, when they first met. "Oh... sorry... I didn't think." Puppets, yes. Funny, yes. But not really for grown-ups.

Horrible Histories is a CBBC adaptation of the hugely successful Terry Deary books. These trade in what every schoolchild doesn't know but will do by the end of break the following day, since they're packed with the kind of historical fact that you want to pass on to others. For example, I hadn't known - and really felt I should have done - that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus expired after treating himself for dropsy by applying a full-body poultice of cow dung. As a grown-up you might quibble with the fact that they don't always distinguish between things that genuinely are true and the things that people would like to be (sadly, there's no hard evidence that Aeschylus was brained by a tortoise dropped by an overflying eagle). But grown-ups and children should enjoy the gleefully anachronistic way in which information is conveyed, such as the spoof advert for Evil Spirit Prevention Door Frame Tar. "It does exactly what what it says on the jar," promised the Geordie Athenian.

The cosmology of Going Postal is perhaps best described as pre-Newtonian. The Earth is flat and rests on the back of three humungous elephants, which in turn rest on the back of a giant turtle. This, as Terry Pratchett devotees will know, is Discworld, an extensively chronicled alternative universe in which the knowing joke is one of the fundamental physical forces. Those who aren't Pratchett devotees might be pleasantly surprised by Going Postal, which is so nicely done that it makes a proselytising case for the author's distinctive imagination. Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, a con-man and fraudster who is saved from the gallows to bring a bit of healthy competition back to the communications industry in Ankh-Morpork. Charles Dance's Lord Vetinari invites him to revitalise the derelict postal system in order to give consumers an alternative to a kind of steampunk telegraphy system, run with monopolistic greed by the villainous Reacher Gilt.

Moist has no intention of doing any such thing, particularly since he soon learns that all his predecessors have died trying. But as he tries to raise enough funds to flee, he inadvertently invents postage stamps - and begins to be haunted by the consequences of his former frauds. He also has the problem of getting away from his probation officer, a giant golem called Mr Pump, who eventually brings him into contact with the love interest in the piece, a young woman who runs a golem rights consciousness-raising group. It looks terrific and is full of good jokes, including a running gag about Stanley, one of the junior postal clerks, who is an obsessive pin collector. In an attempt to make small talk with him, Moist mentions that he's seen Pins Monthly on the newsstands. "That rag is for hobbyists," hisses Stanley. "True pinheads only read Total Pins." There are appropriately scary villains, some lovely special effects, including a tsunami of undelivered letters that pursues Moist through the corridors of the old Post Office, and just enough real feeling to make you care about what happens next. One of the opening credits read "Mucked about by Terry Pratchett", but neither he, nor they, mucked it up.