Tom Sutcliffe

First Night: Blandings, BBC1

Somebody had at one point mixed in a cartoonish comedy sound effect to underline a joke - as if Wodehouse's comedy is a comic-strip affair, rather than a lovely collision of the highest style with the emptiest content. As television it wasn't bad at all. As Wodehouse, it wasn't quite good enough.

Review - Numb: Simon Amstell Live at the BBC, BBC4

Is self-consciousness contagious? When I started watching Numb: Simon Amstell Live at the BBC I was feeling pretty relaxed. But by the end I was almost as knotted with anxieties as he is.

I don't get Miranda, the sitcom. I've tried, and I can sort of see why other people do when it's at its giddy best. On the other hand, I do absolutely get Miranda Hart, who is a great comedian. When the sitcom humiliates her character, I can't laugh. But when Hart plays a line that is about attitude alone, I can't not. Odd, but true.

This was the year of Olympic memories - Danny Boyle's opening ceremony, the Queen ad-libbing with James Bond, a cascade of British Gold - but John Morton's comedy supplied the biggest laughs week after week. It was, in the words of Ian Fletcher, "all good".

Quietly brilliant and deserving of a lot more noise, Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine's hospital comedy has explored the intersection between what's funny and what's heartbreaking without any self-regard or fuss.

I have caught up with Last Tango in Halifax a bit late, and, on the evidence of last night's episode, I'm having a little difficulty seeing what all the fuss has been about.

It's undemanding and warm-hearted, true, and it makes a change to have a drama centred on an older couple. but I'm not convinced that saying "reet" or "'appen" now and then really turns Derek Jacobi into a convincing Yorkshireman and whatever its leads do to overturn stereotypes of the old is surely counterbalanced by Alan's "comedy geezer" friends maurice and Harry.

It also does not, to put it mildly, stick to Larry David's Law, which decrees "no hugging, no learning". There are passages when Last Tango in Halifax appears to consist of little else, animosities and ancient grudges melting away with every clinch. And there'll be a lot more hugging before it's over. Alan has "a twinge".

Sky's seasonal Little Crackers series returned with an autobiographical short about a Sixties model, directed by Joanna Lumley, who took a small cameo role herself as a fashion magazine grande dame. "Baby, Be Blonde" was an innocent affair, as guileless as a teen-magazine photo-romance. It told the story of a Lumley-like ingénue, briefly tempted by the magical glamour conferred on her by her new blond wig (suddenly men are whistling at her in the street) but then rebelling against the oafish sexism of a Baileyesque photographer, in the interests of sisterhood and solidarity. Lumley went through all this at the time, so I guess she's got the details right. But I still found it tricky to buy the notion of the hottest young snapper on the block doing a shoot for a knitting pattern catalogue.

Last night's viewing - A Young Doctor's Notebook

The stories have been made more comic and less grimly stark than the originals, Radcliffe playing the young doctor as an innocent out of his depth and keen to conceal the fact from the knowing nurses and medical orderly he notionally outranks. And, setting aside uncertainties, it's been very nicely done, with Vicki Pepperdine as an older nurse who fiercely protects the memory of the predecessor in the post, Leopold Leopoldovich, and Adam Godley as the hospital orderly, a man with a personality more numbing than chloroform.

The crude description of Some Girls would be a female Inbetweeners. It's got four crisply differentiated school-age friends and a similar salty take on teenage sexuality and exasperation with the adult world. But the crude description doesn't entirely do justice to what's distinctive about Bernadette Davis's comedy, which is a definite tilt towards drama and sympathy. When the camera catches Holli preparing her siblings' lunch boxes by putting a boiled potato and M&Ms into each one, you're simultaneously invited to laugh at the menu and to feel a little pang at her precocious maternal responsibilities. I'm far too old and male to say whether it's authentically representative of young girls' lives, but there's heart here.

Comic Strip Presents... Five Go to Rehab is only explainable by some kind of conspiracy theory, since it lacked any kind of coherent plot or much in the way of jokes. It did have a very impressive cast - all of the originals having succumbed to somebody's arm-twisting to turn up for the 30th anniversary reunion. What a pity the laughs had a previous engagement.