Tom Sutcliffe

Peep Show returned on Friday - with Jeremy reluctantly taking up a job at JLB International, only to be made redundant - along with everyone else in the business - before it's even time for mid-morning coffee. This was a great disappointment for Mark, who had been hoping to exploit his newly acquired managerial power ("Maybe I could make him wear a little coloured hat like a chimpanzee," he'd mused, as they set off for work). He was also dismayed that Jeremy seemed to feel that a one-and-a-half-hour service record qualified him to be as stunned by dismissal as someone who'd been working his way through the cubicle farm for five long years. "You're freeloading on my trauma! You're a grief thief!" he complained, when Jeremy murmured something collegiate about the shock. It all ended badly after Mark had rallied his employees in rebellion against head office, for the sole purpose of getting Dobby into bed. It all ended badly, that is, in a very good way.

No Holds Bard, a spoof documentary about a Burns recitation competition, had its work cut out to take away the taste of that title, but managed it in the end, being full of good glancing jokes. Denis Lawson plays Miekel McMiekel, president of the Dumfries Burns Society and a man determined to hold on to the cup for the seventh year running, despite the fact that their star performer Struan is in the middle of a messy break-up from his wife and can barely get through a single line of "Ae Fond Kiss" without bursting into tears. The competition was provided by Hayley, a young girl tormented by her pushy mother (Ashley Jensen), Paula, an English incomer stubbornly blind to the violent anti-English feeling of her neighbours, and Stevie, a prisoner from a local jail who has been encouraged to enter by his naively trusting literacy teacher.

It got a bit farcically over-excited towards the end - as if the plot actually mattered - but you could forgive it a lot for the invention of the Timorous Beastie Boys, three spotty adolescents who rapped their way through a "street" version of "Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn".

Society worth preserving

Sometimes the best moments on television are the ones that blindside you, coming from an angle you don't expect.

There was a nice example in Jam & Jerusalem last night, a little moment of extraordinarily intense feeling staging an ambush on an audience that was probably meandering along perfectly happily, expecting to be called on for nothing more than a gentle chuckle or a half smile of recognition. It brought tears to my eyes, in fact, which was partly just sympathetic vibration, since everybody on screen was dabbing at theirs, but was also something to do with how true the scene was to the little society that Jennifer Saunders has created in Clatterford. Maybe the scheduling helped too - this series of the rural sitcom having been written in 30-minute segments but transmitted in three hour-long episodes, a slot that makes it easier to think of it as a wry kind of drama rather than a sitcom.

I would have liked to have invested about a quarter of an hour less in How to Be Old, the latest of Nicholas Craig's spoofs on luvvie affectation, in which he shared his accumulated wisdom about third-age acting. An hour was a long time to sustain the joke - though many of the jokes you got were pretty good - and the implicit satire on the predictable way in which old age is depicted on screen certainly struck home. Craig offered advice on bronchial- wheezing techniques, sudden tumbles and doddering ("standards of limping have improved immeasurably recently"), all illustrated with montages of older actors going through every geriatric cliché in the book. I liked his guide to the casting bible Spotlight too: "There's Young, which is where you'll find all the middle-aged actors, then there's the Leading section, for older actors, and Character... for very old ugly actors."

Taking the Flak is dependent on collegiate war stories too, rather more literally in this case since BBC2's new comedy is about foreign correspondents covering a small African war that has just got big. For Harry Chambers, the local stringer, this is a good news/bad news deal. On the one hand, his long service in this grim station may finally be rewarded with a few seconds' airtime on the main bulletins. On the other, he is almost certain to be "bigfooted" - edged out by the arrival of a more famous colleague, whose in-depth research consists in pumping the hotel waiter for basic facts 40 seconds before a live two-way with Sophie Raworth (who appears as herself). The fact that BBC News felt comfortable about allowing its anchors and studio to add verisimilitude to the comedy tells you something about its lack of real bite. And although this comedy, too, is built on the black humour of a closed cadre of professionals ("Would you like your rooms on the shooting side or the mortar side?" a hotel receptionist asked the arriving hacks), there's never a sense that you're just eavesdropping. Everything's effortfully designed to get an audience reaction, most effortfully with a running gag about a World Service reporter's irritable bowel problem. And whereas the crap in Getting On smells like the real thing, the crap in Taking the Flak is more like a plastic joke-shop turd.

It is a great subject for a comedy and it does have its moments, whether it's the interplay between a producer struggling in the field and a desk producer who has enough time on his hands to make Daleks out of coffee cups, or the skewed cultural grasp of the local fixer ("Goodfellas... my favourite comedy movie! That Joe Pesci!"). But while Getting On cares about being true first and hardly seems to care whether you laugh or not, Taking the Flak cares so much that you feel almost embarrassed when you don't laugh as often as you'd like to.

One of the clues to successfully turning an in-joke into an out-joke is to trust people to get it without too much signalling. Getting On, a comedy set in an under-resourced geriatric ward, clearly understands this, beginning in a way so indifferent to the arrival of newcomers (us, watching) that you almost feel you should cough to let them know you're there.

Sister Flixter is sitting by an old lady's bedside, one hand checking her texts, the other clasping the patient's limp hand. The camera pans slowly to show a cake - "Happy Birthday Lily 87" - and then, without any fuss, it becomes apparent that Lily isn't going to be eating any of it. It's the kind of detail that might be played for cheap pathos in a different kind of series, but here - without a line of script - it very effectively delivers a key signature. This is a comedy about a place where the bleakly mortal and the banal are continually rubbing up against each other.

Sister Flixter didn't have much time to worry about Lily because a something distracted her, a coil of excrement discovered on a ward chair by Nurse Wilde (Jo Brand). To Nurse Brand, this is "shit". To Sister Flixter, it's a "critical incident", which will require the requisite NHS paperwork and to Dr Moore (Vicki Pepperdine), it is a "faecal deposit" and valuable raw material for her current research. For want of a stool pot the stained chair was pushed into an alcove behind hazard tape, where it is still odorously contributing to the ward's atmosphere of mismanagement when the new matron turned up later to add yet another chief to a tribe already short on Indians. That's the central joke of Getting On - of priorities and interests competing so effectively that virtually nothing gets done - though "joke" is too crude a word for the stealthy way in which the humour bubbles up through the cracks.

Written by its three leads and directed by Peter Capaldi, Getting On is in the tradition of The Office and The Thick of It, rather than Only When I Laugh or Green Wing. You can feel the grit of real events inside the comedy, such as the ludicrous attempt to translate the genial babblings of a patient speaking some unidentified Indian language (they discover she's been saying "I want to die. Please kill me") or the closing moment when Sister Flixter and Nurse Wilde found themselves having to mumble their condolences to Lily's sister, through mouths still filled with the dead woman's cake. And the most surreal gags turn out to be true. Dr Moore's strange obsession with the patient's bowel movements turns out to be the result of an ambition to "expand the Bristol Stool Chart from the current seven to an exhaustive 37 types of patient faeces". Wonderfully, the Bristol Stool Chart really does exist, a turd-spotter's identification chart that runs the fecal gamut from "hard lumps, like nuts" to "entirely liquid". Getting On doesn't feature on it anywhere.

Personal Affairs - a bit of chick-lit bubblegum for BBC3 about four PAs in a city bank - isn't abashed about its influences. One of the characters does a Carrie twirl on coming out of the Subway, sorry, Tube station, and they even have the pert little musical stings from Desperate Housewives to remind you that they have their tongue in their cheeks. You'd need a bigger tongue and a much more cheek to get away with this, though. There's a lot of voguish, swooshing montages of the city in the breaks between scenes and Barbie-doll characterisation that gives you a fame-obsessed scouser, a porcelain organisation queen, a sex-hungry vamp and an Essex girl with dreams of jumping the fence from Secretarial to Executive. Last week's opener included several fantasy sequences, in which the various male executives saw their assembled PAs as a harem of dominatrixes or a rank of biddable Fifties stenographers.

Then the fantasy sequences faded away and it became clear that the whole thing is a kind of delirium, as unembarrassed about the ludicrous implausibility of its plotting as it is about the models it aspires to. As the sub-plots mounted - abduction, bank heist, enigmatic stalkers - it dawned on you that it was Enid Blyton with added shagging, a feisty all-girl gang who only break off from mystery solving to have a quick knee-trembler with the lift-repair man or disappear into a stationery cupboard with one of the less repellent bankers. It's terrible, but every now and then it glints oddly in the light in a way that makes it hard to write it off entirely. What are we to make, for example, of the posh lesbian with the Marie Antoinette pompadour and the taste for classical tags? I can't bear to watch another episode to work it out, but if you have suggestions I'd be grateful to receive them.

"Oh, don't call it that," I thought, when I first saw the publicity for Hope Springs, the BBC's latest Sunday evening series.

Hope Springs might be the obvious title for a drama set in a small village of the same name, a drama which, I'm guessing, will demonstrate that, even if £3m of your money goes up in smoke marooning you and your friends in a Scottish backwater, life will eventually compensate you with less material rewards. But it's also a hostage to fortune and, it turns out, a really bad title for a drama as clunky as this. Hope is very poorly, you think, as it begins to dawn on you how far-fetched and laborious the set-up is. And by the time the final credits roll, the undertaker is erecting the headstone on hope's grave.

It might be argued that my hopes were unreasonably high anyway. Ann McManus, Maureen Chadwick and Liz Lake's drama comes from Shed Productions, the company that produced Bad Girls and Footballers' Wives. So, obviously, this account of four female ex-cons, accidentally diverted from a prosperous retirement in Barbados, was never intended to be another Brideshead Revisited. It's there as an end-of-the-weekend wind-down, the only problem being that it's never quite tongue-in-cheek or over-the-top enough to make you forgive its shortcomings.

Even its virtues - such as the reassuringly unprettified surroundings they find themselves in, all electricity pylons and radar domes rather than postcard Scottish glens - only makes things worse. You've got the setting for something that might be mordantly funny (like the first series of Shameless, say), but the plot and psychological depth of a children's comic.

The essential plot is this. Having scammed £3m out of her crooked boyfriend, Ellie plans to leg it to the sun with three friends. Unfortunately, the woman delivering their passports expired on the luggage carousel, leaving them with no option but to hop a train to Fort William and find somewhere to lay low, while Ellie's vengeful boyfriend searches for them. Then, for a reason that I still haven't worked out, Ellie decided to buy the local hotel, somehow convinced that this will make a better cover story when they apply for new passports. She didn't seem to have noted that paying for a hotel with a stack of crisp new £50 notes might arouse suspicion, even in the sleepiest Scottish village.

But then that hardly matters since nothing else makes sense here, not even the acting, which, with the exception of a nicely deadpan sheep, was coarse enough to grate carrots on. "What the hell have we got ourselves into?" wailed Ellie - after an arson attack by the local thug incinerates all their loot - and it's hard not to read the line as a cry of pain from Alex Kingston the actress, rather than the character she's playing.

I've laughed at Benidorm before now, but last night's special was a distinctly laboured affair. "There are no strangers in Benidorm, only friends you haven't met," said the oily Spanish waiter at one point. "What bloody Christmas cracker did you get that out of?" replied another character. The same one where they got the jokes, I take it. There were thudding malapropisms ("The doctor thinks you might have percussion," said to a man who's just had a blow to the head), comic misunderstandings (a man called Wheedon is addressed as Senor Widdle by a doctor) and creaky physical comedy (man rushes to open door to stairs only to find that it's a broom cupboard). Let's go somewhere else next year.

Not a few people were puzzled that Pulling should have been shown the door while lesser comedies thrived, but BBC3 obviously felt bad enough about it to give Sharon Horgan's comedy a farewell special. It was funny and - for fans wishing to clutch at straws - ended with a scene that screamed To Be Continued.