Tom Sutcliffe

Big Top, a new sitcom set in a travelling circus, is one of those programmes that get you wondering about the commissioning process. You'll need something to entertain you while it's on and speculating about the way it came into being will do as well as anything, unless you've got a dog that's overdue for a combing or some socks to pair up. One assumes that the performers' names came first on the pitch document. One certainly hopes that they came first on the pitch document, since the idea that it was sold on the essential concept and a sample of the writing seems implausible, to say the least. We've thought of a vehicle for Amanda Holden, somebody said, and what's more it's a role that will make it feasible for her to wear hotpants and black stockings nearly all the time. And if you bite there's a good chance that we can bolt on John Thompson, Tony Robinson and Ruth Madoc. How's that for belt-and-braces coverage? Cold Feet, Blackadder and a dab of Hi-De-Hi! behind the ears.

"So what's the sit?" asks the commissioning editor. Down-at-heel circus, replies the pitcher, run by Lizzie, a mildly over-controlling ringmistress who's the only grown-up on payroll. There's a terrible husband-and-wife clown act, a depressive East European acrobat with a crush on Holden's character, a cynical soundman called Erasmus (Tony Robinson) and the self-seeking Welsh dame who does a performing-dog routine. Oh, and it's written by Daniel Peak, who wrote Not Going Out, so there's a bit of pedigree there. Lot of running gags, lot of slapstick, comedy of types. Think Dad's Army with red noses and spandex tights. And then, one guesses - since it's not very often these days that sitcoms get green-lit without jumping through this particular hoop - there would have been a rehearsed reading of the script, so that a collection of executives could mull over its prospects. And it's at this point that speculation hits an obstacle. How could they sit in the presence of gags this lame and character depiction this arbitrary and not say no?

It does go out at 7.30pm, so it's possible that the younger audience will be advanced as an alibi. It seems heartless to use children as a human shield in this way though, and surely they deserve better than gags about ferrets down trousers and punch lines that audibly creak as they're winched into place. "I was so worried that you'd fail us on the raw sewage round the hot-dog stand," blurted out Lizzie when the health and safety inspector gave her the all clear, a line that not even Helen Mirren could have made psychologically plausible. And without an underlying psychological plausibility (the urgent cartoon drives that you'll always find in Hi-De-Hi! and Dad's Army if you dig deep enough) it just isn't comic. That line isn't an inadvertent revelation - it's hopelessly, mechanically advertant, only there to be funny. In the end, an exchange between Plonky the clown and Erasmus offered the best verdict: "If we're so terrible why do we get a big cheer when we finish?" "I think you've answered your own question there."

Cast Offs, Channel 4's new drama about six disabled people comes with a narrative scaffolding designed to get you over any viewer prejudice that might be aroused by the phrase "drama about six disabled people". It presents itself as a kind of Big Brother reality exercise, in which a selection pack of the "differently abled" are marooned on an island for three months to see how they survive. "This isn't a camping trip, April..." said one of the participants. "We're here to prove something." One of the things they're there to prove, it seems, is that the disabled can be just as dirty-minded and grumpy and clumsy in the face of disability as anyone else - the early scenes offering a positive orgy of political incorrectness of various kinds. That's all a little laborious, as is the reality show armature itself, which is never used to satirise television itself (as it might easily have been) but only as a way of getting these very disparate people into one place, so that they can have flashbacks about their ordinary lives. But the flashbacks are surprisingly good, far exceeding the gimmick that has winched them into place.

Each episode cuts between ensemble scenes on the island and a more focused version of one character's back story. Last night, it was Dan's turn and this account of a young man coming to terms with his paralysis was beautifully done, including some touching scenes between Dan and his parents, in which all the self-conscious gaminess of the island sequences dropped away to be replaced by something that looked awkwardly true to life. It may be that future episodes do more with the gimmicky frame, but for the moment it's what's inside it that's worth watching.

Right back in the spin

It's an odd and often depressing business writing notes about a comedy show. When the comedy doesn't work you end up with a meagre stack of descriptive redundancies that are only there because you wanted to show willing.

The Armstrong & Miller Show is one of those programmes that it's best to watch with a fast-forward button at your disposal. It isn't that they aren't funny, by any means. I laughed out loud at one new sketch, which replays P.G. Wodehouse without the innocence, with the Bertie Wooster character exasperatedly asking his butler to murder a kitchen-maid that he's impregnated. The joke is that the Jeeves type still inhabits a world in which both the pregnancy and the solution are as unthinkable as DayGlo spats: "Perhaps if Sir were to disguise himself as an Abyssinian?" he suggested hopefully. There was a textbook bit of comic acting from Ben Miller too - in a skit about compensation-claim adverts - when in rapid succession he had to do fake pain and real pain (you had to be there really). But they return to some ideas far too often. The Blue Peter-style apology - in which you read between the bland lines of BBC damage control to a squalid bacchanal of sex and drugs - was funny the first time, quite funny the second but wearing distinctly thin the third time it came back, when we were still only 15 minutes into the show.

I tried to think of Gandhi while watching Lunch Monkeys, a squalid office sitcom that occasionally makes you think of marching on Television Centre and setting fire to the BBC3 offices. Lord, it's depressing, one of those comedies that relies for its laughs (and it's audience, for that matter) on a collection of implausibly dim-witted people. If you find incontinence, phantom shitters and armpit-farts the acme of wit, you're in for a treat. But if you prefer a comedy not to have plastic protagonists and offer real human insights, I suggest you rent a copy of Toy Story instead.

"Nowadays, it seems like experts give birth to a new theory every few minutes," said Andy Hamilton at the beginning of It's Only a Theory. I don't know about that, but if so they're at least matched by comedians pupping new comedy-panel shows, most of which, sadly, are doomed to be tied in a sack and dropped into the swiftly flowing river of television oblivion. I'm guessing that It's Only a Theory isn't going to make it to adulthood, because it's very difficult to work out what it's for or how it's meant to work. A panel of two gag merchants (Hamilton and Reginald Hunter, who can both be funny) are joined by a celeb guest (it was Clare Balding this week) to offer peer group review on the theories of scientists and experts who quite like the idea of being on telly. They then say whether they've been approved or rejected, though it isn't clear on what basis they arrive at this decision and nobody gives a damn anyway. Last night, they batted around the ideas of a gerentologist who thinks the first 1,000-year-old person has already been born and a psychologist who believes that we shouldn't medicalise sadness - these two topics provoking a meandering and underwhelming blend of flippancy and bland earnestness. It isn't that the machinery doesn't work, it's that they completely forgot to put the machinery in. I can only hope it isn't distracting Hamilton from writing more episodes of Outnumbered.

Monty Python - Almost the Truth: the BBC Lawyers' Cut began with what we can now call a Pythonesque title sequence. Over an animation of global apocalypse someone sang a Bond-style theme tune: "It's a new documentary... it's not complimentary... but it's better than a hysterectomy". True on the first and last count, but not on the middle one, since this trot through Monty Python history was actually quite flattering to the programme and the people that made it, barring Graham Chapman, perhaps, who isn't around anymore to mind. In rock-band geneology style, it traced the past pedigree of a group that eventually came together with little more than a vague wish to travel in the same direction. "It was the worst interview that anyone or any group has ever done," said Cleese, describing the terrible pitch they made to the BBC. "I'll give you 13 shows, but that's all ," replied the commissioning editor, which was what passed for rigour in those days, and the rest - after the wobbly start that all truly innovative comedies have because they've got to teach the audience a new kind of funny - was history. The best bit was Cleese's curiously barbed attempt at long-distance teasing of Terry Jones. "What Terry's never been able to accept," he said earnestly, "is that the Welsh are a subject people put on earth to carry out menial tasks for the English".

Quickening of the pulse

"If we can keep it going imaginatively, without just trotting it out, I think it's worth it," Martin Clunes said recently about Doc Martin, now in its fourth series.

Men don't emerge very well from How Not to Live Your Life either, though the specimens on show in BBC3's sitcom are too timid and childish to represent a threat to anybody but themselves. I have a faint memory that I gave a charitable review to Dan Clark's series on an earlier occasion, for which I can offer my apologies, because whatever virtues I detected in it then have entirely evaporated. The gimmick is an occasional break for an animated Letterman list gag - "Five Things You Shouldn't Do in the Theatre", for example - with the narrative action pausing as Clark acts out the alternatives. There are moments when the lips twitch fitfully during these sequences, but they're restored to default mode (frozen into a kind of appalled wince) by the startling charmlessness of the central character in all the other bits. Oddly, my technology continues to try and tell me things. The DVD player stalled at one point and flashed up a message: "There was an error reading from disc. It might be scratched or dirty". Dirty, I think, given that our hero had just extricated himself from an awkward relationship by pretending to be a gerontophile: "You don't need someone to wipe your bum after you've been to the toilet," he explained apologetically, "...and that's the kind of thing that gets me going." "Are you sure you want to quit?" the DVD software asked me as I finished watching and closed it down. There are days when it crosses my mind, I thought.

I can't imagine that there will be a big demographic overlap with the potential audience for Trinity, ITV2's weird gothic thriller, set in a fictional Oxbridge-style college. The first time I looked at this the online screening system stuttered wildly, so that the soundtrack ran fluently beneath a series of still images of the characters gaping wildly. It was like a strange high-tech version of Deidre's Photo Casebook from The Sun, and it seemed appropriate really because all the dialogue here would be far more at home in a speech bubble. The story begins with the death of a vicar in a mist-swathed churchyard and then shifts to new term at Trinity, a traditional establishment just about to take its first intake of swotty oiks. The college's usual students - dandyish young toffs who are majoring in advanced hooliganism and applied debauchery - don't think much to this. There is boy tottie and girl tottie, a lot of sophomorically naughty sex, and a couple of comedy dopers who are about as funny as accidentally stubbing a joint out on your own kneecap. What there isn't is a shred of psychological continuity, so that at one moment a mousey Christian student is expressing shock at what one takes is her first sight of a naked man and at the next she's helping him to peel off her knickers. It wants to be so bad it's good, but sadly it's not quite bad enough to make it.