Tom Sutcliffe

You might think that Sacha Baron Cohen had queered the pitch for ambush television in the States, making people so wary of foreign television crews that it would be impossible to successfully pull off a spoof documentary. If you go where deranged self-regard and narcissism is the norm, however, you still stand a fighting chance. In La La Land, Marc Wootton has done just that. He plays three expatriate Brits hoping to make their mark in Hollywood, and films his encounters with various unwitting stooges who make a living by servicing the egos of the ambitious. We've seen one of the characters before - Shirley Ghostman, a camp television medium who has arrived in Los Angeles fleeing police charges in England. The logic of his back story didn't entire make sense, but it was still funny to see the brisk professionalism of the publicity agent he was consulting, as she fished helplessly through the wreckage of his recent CV trying to find an upside. Also hoping to build a career are Gary, an Essex geezer who thinks he's the next Jason Statham because everyone looks at him in the pub back home and Brendan Allen, a bearded documentary-maker. The stooges, incidentally, mostly come off with their dignity intact, quickly recognising that Wootton's characters are absolute idiots and in most cases telling them so, but with a degree of exasperation that suggests they haven't twigged that it's wind-up. The funniest moment was the long sequence in which Brendan doggedly tried to pitch an "innovative" shark documentary using underwater cameras, reacting to the tactful explanation that this had been done many times before as a failure to grasp the novelty of his suggestion: "No, no... I don't think you understand what I'm saying," he explained patiently, "we'd be underneath... you know, below where the boats are." There was strong competition for that top spot though, largely because of the detail and nimbleness of Wootton's characterisations. It's genuinely funny.

"Karl! You are living in a cartoon world!" shrieked Ricky Gervais, in the very first of the podcasts he recorded with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. They all are now, HBO having taken the original recordings and added Hanna-Barbera-ish visuals to what they introduce, in a portentously grand American voice, as "a series of pointless conversations". Gervais looks like a knock-off Fred Flintstone and Stephen Merchant like some amiable gump out of a Seventies road-safety film, while Pilkington is just a baffled pink golf ball. If you missed the originals, Pilkington is the point of thing - his stupefied take on the world the catalyst for Merchant and Gervais's flights of fantasy (and delighted incredulity). "I've seen him blossom from an idiot into an imbecile," said Gervais fondly as they started out, though half the fun of it is that in between absurdities, Pilkington will occasionally stumble on an undeniable truth: "If you haven't bungee-jumped by the time you're 78," he pointed out flatly, "you're not going to do it."

The animation has allowed HBO to fill out the more florid phrases, so when Gervais reacted to a particularly groggy aperçu from Pilkington by saying "he sounds like he was found in a glacier and thawed out", you get a little sequence showing the defrosting. This quite often adds to the comedy of the original. But there are times when you sense a loss too, particularly in the yelping reactions that follow some particularly dopey remark from Pilkington. On the ear, these eruptions of hilarity were very infectious, and the deliberate simplicity of the animation occasionally seems to mask the expressiveness of the voice, rather than match it. It is still funny, though, not to mention a very canny bit of recycling.

Last Night's Television: Bruce Forsyth: A Comedy Roast

The point about a comedy roast - spectacularly missed by the newspapers who indignantly reported on Jonathan Ross's insulting remarks about Bruce Forsyth recently - is that the guest of honour is on the spit. An essentially American institution, in which showbiz entertainers gather for what the Scots would call a flyting - or an insult contest - the whole idea is that you let them have it with the best you've got. Offence and embarrassment don't have an invitation, since the only breach of good taste at such events would be to serve underarm because you thought the recipient couldn't handle anything tougher. What's really interesting about them, though - apart from the occasional pre-prepared aces - is that embarrassment is always lurking about there somewhere, waiting to pounce on the possibility that a friendly insult might have strayed just a little too close to a nerve. And in the first of Channel 4's Comedy Roast's it looked to me as if embarrassment was spending quite a lot of time near Jimmy Carr and Jonathan Ross.

Rock & Chips was a strange affair, a 90-minute amplification of one of the running gags in Only Fools and Horses, that concerning Rodney's dubious parentage. All the old gang - Del and Trigger and Boycie - were on hand as schoolboys, but John Sullivan's drama was less interested in them than in the brief affair between Joanie, Del's mum, and Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, a career criminal, played here (naturally) by Nicholas Lyndhurst. Less interested, too, in straightforward sitcom than an unsatisfactory hybrid of classic Trotter cheekiness and something much more melancholy and heartfelt. The soundtrack was like an antique jukebox and there were some sly touches of period detail (a cigarette machine in a hospital waiting room), but the narrative's focus was blurred and the pacing weirdly off - quite a lot of the time you were well ahead of the drama and hanging around for it to catch up with you.

Last Night's Television

Some of the dialogue is awkwardly leveraged towards a punchline, and the characters will need a more time to bed down into the character predictability that is one element of a successful sitcom. But there's enough going on here, I would have thought, to persuade viewers that it might be worth sticking around long enough to allow that bedding down to take place.

As safe as houses

People giggled when I said I was going to be reviewing The Many Faces of June Whitfield. What was it? The mismatch between the fusty bombast of the first half of the title and the slightly parochial connotations of the subject? Would the name June Whitfield have done it on its own - as a marker of a very Middle English type of comedy - or did it need the mildewed showbiz-bio description as well? It is, you'd have to admit, the kind of title that keys you up for a spoof. It's got something of "Balham - Gateway to the South" about it, an association that wasn't exactly dispelled by the opening line of the voiceover: "For more than 60 years, one woman has been at the beating heart of British comedy". But while Steve Coogan - the Inside Story took the very wise precaution of sending itself up now and then, The Many Faces of June Whitfield was played absolutely in earnest. Tongue and cheek never met once as a parade of approbatory clichés ("consummate professional", "pin-sharp timing", "joy to write for") filed past. If this documentary had been a person it would have been wearing a Pringle sweater and a silk cravat, just as Nicholas Parsons was, in fact, when he popped up to hymn June's indispensability to the string of top-of-the-bill comics she'd worked with.

I haven't always been a fan of Catherine Tate's Nan either, admiring the character work but finding the essential joke a little repetitive. But Catherine Tate: Nan's Christmas Carol managed to refresh two overworked franchises simultaneously: Tate's horrible old lady gag and Charles Dickens' snow-dusted morality tale. Nan makes a perfect Scrooge, hideously unseasonal when Uncle Bob Cratchit turned up on a visit from Yorkshire with his queasily cheerful children. She wasn't exactly pleased with the gift they'd given her - a charity donation to the Mobile Library of Sudan. "It's a picture of an Arab man standing next to a donkey with half-a-dozen copies of The Da Vinci Code strapped to its back," she said witheringly on opening the envelope. It's an alternative present, her great-niece explained. "What... alternative to something I wanted?" she snapped back. She demanded ID from the Ghost of Christmas Past and told the Ghost of Christmas Future that his introductory video was rubbish. Offered the chance to change the future after her admonitory vision of a loveless old age and lonely funeral, the first thing she asked was, "Could they bring back Lovejoy... I do love it."

Victoria Wood, God bless her, had a crack at Lark Rise to Candleford in her Christmas Eve special, Victoria Wood's Midlife Christmas, packaged and presented as a kindly gift to middle-aged couch potatoes. The target was a whale in a barrel, frankly, but there were still some fine jokes, including the scene in which Cranchesterford's teenagers exchanged embroidery text messages, stitching like fury and then handing the frame over to a nearby urchin to deliver. There were also some terrible jokes, though knowingly and lovingly handcrafted to be terrible, so that it didn't matter. Given its content, the line "I could have been a corn tender", uttered by the family paterfamilias when he wistfully recalled his unfulfilled ambition to go into the seed trade, was surely an unbeatable candidate for corniest gag of the Christmas break. Julie Walters was on good form too as Bo Beaumont, fruitlessly struggling to build public presence after years of playing Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. She walked out of Strictly Come Dancing because she couldn't master the three-step warm-up Anton du Beke tried to teach her, was passed over for a new Delia series because her signature dish - crackermole, a sardine on a Tuc cracker - didn't appeal, and pulled out of Who Do You Think You Are? when it becomes clear that she was going to have to reveal her true name and date of birth.

The Story of Slapstick began by being mildly diverting (good clips of Chaplin and Buster Keaton) but got more and more infuriating as it proceeded, undone by feeble apercus from its contributors ("Tears and laughter are very close" - Nicholas Parsons) and transparently wrong-headed cultural generalisations in the script ("We can't get enough of silent comedy these days." Eh?) By the end, I wanted to smack it in the face with a giant frying pan.

The Fattest Man in Britain looked as if it was going to be filed under Northern Grotesque. You had Bobby Ball in a cab promising his excited Japanese passengers "the eighth wonder of the world". And then you saw Georgie's pudgy hand reaching for the aftershave bottle and splashing it on underneath a bingo wing the size of a sofa cushion. When Timothy Spall, just visible inside his fat suit, began singing "Turning Japanese", complete with slitty-eye gestures, for his paying guests it looked as if we were in for an exercise of gleeful bad taste. In fact, Caroline Aherne's drama (co-written with producer Jeff Pope) turned out to be a lot sweeter and life-affirming than you might have expected, contriving a Beauty and the Beast relationship between Georgie and Amy, the community-service girl who came to clear his garden. For her, he was the dad she's never had; for him, she was the first person to care for him who didn't have an interest in him getting bigger. Although he was initially devastated by the realisation that he had a heavier rival ("If I'm not the fattest, what am I, eh? I'm just a fat man") he finally struggled out of his chair and slimmed down to win her back. I wasn't entirely convinced that it would have been as easy as it was made to look, but very happy to pretend while it lasted.