Tom Sutcliffe

"So, now I have to step into your shoes, but after you've shat in them," said Ollie in the last Thick of It, learning that his first task as Malcolm's stand-in was to spin the arrest of his predecessor on charges of perjury. Malcolm didn't think Ollie was going to be able to fill those shoes, though. "You're not even Manchester's top Malcolm Tucker tribute band," he roared before a meltdown that combined blistering invective with genuine melancholy and pain. Glenn got a lot of things off his chest too, in an episode that ended on the implication that, while some cogs had gone, the machine rumbles on regardless. I hope this is not the end.

Harry & Paul returned, combining a few sketches that make you wonder whether the long hours in make-up are justified (I could happily lose Postman Pataweyo and the club gents obsessed with "queers") with a lot more that are masterclasses in comic style. This week included a hilarious sequence mocking the audience participation in Question Time, a lovely British remake of Strangers on a Train, and an excellent variation on "I Saw You Coming", in which the posh bandit set up a stall at a pop festival ("We were at Fleeced last week and we're off to More Money Than Sense next week," said his mark excitedly). It concluded with a Danish makeover of several regular sketches, complete with subtitles, which actually left me breathless. Do yourself a favour and seek it out on iPlayer.

Review: They jabbed & poked but Black emerged unscathed

In the event it was something of an anti-climax.

The weekend's viewing: The Thick of It, Sat, BBC2

It was both very funny and also the closest thing we've had to serious political drama on television for far too long.

Last night's viewing: Hebburn, BBC2

It's not the easiest thing for a comedy to establish itself in the viewer's affections in just one episode, but Hebburn does it. It has a great cast, but more importantly than that it has sufficient sharpness of characterisation for them to show how good they can be right from the off.

Last night's viewing: Getting On, BBC4

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to explain why Getting On is so good. If you don't like it - and the mere existence of comedies such as Not Going Out and Me and Mrs Jones suggests there must be people who prefer their sitcoms less subtle - then it's hard to know where to start exactly.

Me and Mrs Jones and Friday Night Dinner are both comedies of domestic life, both of them making an appeal to a sense of shared experience. And one of them works and one of them absolutely doesn't. The one that doesn't is Me and Mrs Jones, which is odd really. It's written by Oriane Messina and Fay Rusling, who have Green Wing and Smack the Pony on their CV, and its comic premise is perfectly workable - a single mother who finds herself falling for her oldest son's best friend. You can play this cross-generational attraction for anguished drama - as ITV's Leaving did recently - but its embarrassments obviously have comic potential too. So why doesn't it bite?

My own explanation would centre on something Gemma's daughter says to her as she drops her off in the playground, after a flustered school run full of slightly effortful blunders: "Stop being a geeky loser." You've hit the nail on the head there, kid, I thought. That, or something like it, is what's written in Gemma's character notes, and it's why we've already had to endure one of those unconvincing scenes in which someone stammers and over-protests after being misheard. Is she really this dim, you think, or is she just written this way? The question doesn't go away as Gemma is forced through a number of over-familiar comic set-pieces - the clumsy answerphone message, agonising over what to wear for a date - all the time behaving not as if she's directed by a recognisable inner psychology but by the need to appear as ditzy as possible. At times, it's desperate, as when Gemma appears from a changing room having tried a dress on over what she's already wearing. Sure. That happens a lot.

Even more problematic is her inconsistency. Gemma is flustered when she really doesn't need to be, but unperturbed when awkwardness might actually make some kind of sense. "Uh! I feel like a teenager on her very first date," she confides, as she gets ready for a night out in front of her son's handsome young friend. A couple of lines later she's blithely explaining to him how she'll use her unshaved legs as contraception. So she's reduced to gibbering silliness by a man she doesn't appear attracted to and coolly overshares with one who notionally has got under her skin. I've never been a single mother in such circumstances, it's true, but I'm still not convinced that's how the world works. The casting doesn't help either. Sarah Alexander looks far too young to be convincing as the mother of a grown-up son and isn't the kind of comedy actress who can finesse the thing into caricature. But the real problem is a script that repeatedly requires her to behave with wild improbability. "I may have slightly over-reacted," she says at one point. Just a bit, Gemma, just a bit.

Robert Popper's Friday Night Dinner contains moments that are tricky to defend as psychological realism. "He looked like Hitler," said odd neighbour Jim, after meeting the grandmother's monstrous new boyfriend. "It's not Hitler, is it?" But Popper's comedy has an internal consistency that makes it work. Jim is strange enough to say something like that. You feel absolutely confident that none of the other characters would, because they stay true to type. The monstrous boyfriend works too, even though he's a kind of cartoon of belligerent old age, because the forms of his unpleasantness are simultaneously unpredictable and credible. "One rule I have when I'm in a vehicle," he barked when driving the boys out on an errand. "Complete silence! Not a word!" After which, he slowly drove into the wall in front of him. Like a lot of good comedy it's simultaneously over the top and understated.

Reviews: Me and Mrs Jones, Friday Night Dinner

It's an odd thing, comic exaggeration - absolutely essential to comedy but also potentially lethal if you get the dose wrong.

Fresh Meat is back and celebrated its return with a magnificent running joke about old meat. Howard started working at the local abattoir and is jubilant at the main perk of the job: "It's spare meat.. from the loose meat bin... It's all right. It's from animals." Kingsley has reappeared sporting a soul patch he gamely tries to pretend is no big deal, Josie is still hankering hopelessly after Kingsley and JP is worrying about his sexuality after the discovery that his friend Giles, with whom he shared masturbatory fumbles in the Stowe dormitories, is actually gay and not just "gay". There's also a promising new tenant in the form of Sabine, who insisted on vetting the water pressure and smoke alarms before taking the room. I'm so looking forward to the new term.