Tom Sutcliffe

I enjoyed Russell Brand's Christmas Ponderland a lot more once I started to imagine the Daily Mail headlines it might provoke: 'Foul-Mouthed Brand in Virgin Mary Blasphemy', perhaps, for the sequence in which he imagined the Holy Mother as an Essex slattern, taking a very dim view of the accommodation.

Or 'Brand in Paedophile Joke Outrage' for the sequence in which he explored the dangers of Christmas Santas: 'I've been working in the grotto trade for quite a while,' he slurred, parodying a Santa manager. 'And I've learnt to get rid of anyone in the nonce line.'

Not that I wouldn't have enjoyed him without the pleasing fantasy of someone harrumphing themselves into an apoplexy. He's not to everyone's taste, as the BBC so painfully discovered, but he is funny.

The show itself is a fairly standard funny-clips-and-commentary deal, but it works because of Brand's wild energy. I particularly enjoyed his indignant dissection of Wizard's song 'I Wish It Could Be a Wombling Merry Christmas Every Day', a number he rightly arraigned for conceptual overkill. An hour of a Wombling Merry Christmas perhaps, but everyday? Surely not.

Why Outnumbered is so good

You'll recognise that the children involved are startlingly natural and funny in their responses, of course, and that Ramona Marquez as five-year-old Karen effortlessly steals any scene in which she features.

If you want to understand the comedy in Beehive, E4's new all-female sketch show, it helps to have a sense of recent television history. One of the sketches here is a virtual remake - shall we say homage, to be polite? - of a classic French and Saunders sketch in which a young child tries to explain the facts of life (a synthetic adult notion of what it would be funny for a child to say, which contrasts markedly with Outnumbered). Elsewhere, you can see the influence of Blackadder II's Queeny (in a sketch in which Queen Elizabeth tries to pretend to her courtiers that she's not a virgin at all), The Fast Show's orange make-up lady (in a returning routine about two passive-aggressive South African air hostesses) and Smack the Pony pretty much everywhere (but particularly in the little video vignettes that interrupt the bigger set pieces).

Memories of Smack the Pony are going to give them the most trouble, because the team here are just not quite as assured about underplaying the comedy (and some of the studio shoots look a little bargain basement). But when they follow their own lines, they can be funny and unexpected. There's a nicely pointless fantasy in which they appear as Russells Brand, all styled and talking like the celebrated Sachs offender. And there was something pleasingly enigmatic about the sketch in which one of the girls claimed to be able to replicate a famous scene from Alien, jabbing between her outspread fingers with a carving knife at dazzling speed while staring impassively in front of her. When she did eventually look down, she discovered she'd cut off all her fingers, an expensive bit of prosthetic work that they rather milked in the reaction shots. But it was the deadpan response of her friend that really made it funny. "I'm sorry... but... is this still part of the film?" she asked quizzically, looking at a shambles of fingertips and blood.

No room to properly do justice to the brilliance of Outnumbered, which has deservedly been promoted to a prime Saturday slot. But I would like to share the theological conundrums a hapless vicar found himself faced with after unwisely crouching down to talk to a group of children at a wedding: 'Why has God only given us 15 thousand billion years left to live before the sun dies?' and, trickier still perhaps, 'What would Jesus do if he was attacked by a polar bear?'

Independent Review

He's not afraid of sentiment, Craig Cash. Indeed, he's not even nervous about painfully cute, judging from the opening of Sunshine, BBC1's new comedy-drama.

Matt Lucas and David Walliams certainly can't be accused of buttering up to American audiences in Little Britain USA, which begins with Tom Baker grandly informing HBO's viewers that we let you win the War of Independence because you threatened to cry if we didn't. They're not going to be accused of overdoing it with new material either. There are some fresh characters here, including a redneck sheriff who gets an erection as he displays weapons to his deputies, and a former astronaut who can't get over the fact that he was the eighth man on the moon and not the first. But mostly they've simply transferred the British regulars Stateside, and not worried much about the plausibility of the move. Quite how Marjorie Dawes comes to be conducting an American weight-loss class isn't clear, though it has to be said that imagining American sensibilities coming in contact with her rasping lack of tact adds a novel twist to the basic gag. Rosie O'Donnell sportingly takes a cameo, which allows two pieties to be outraged at once: Are you fat because you're a lesbian, she was asked by Marjorie, Or are you a lesbian because you're fat?

The show would be a lot easier to like if you had the sense that such calculated shocks were serving something other than mere shock itself.