Tom Sutcliffe

Last night's viewing - Best Possible Taste

Everett drama aimed to reinforce nostalgic affection, not make nostalgia impossible.

After nearly 13 years in television's equivalent of cryogenic suspension (barring a brief defrost in 2009), the Red Dwarf team have been resuscitated for a full-scale series, with a studio audience. A very fond studio audience, judging from the laughter that greeted even relatively straightforward lines in the opening episode. But then the ability of Red Dwarf to mesh the banal with the futuristic is deserving of fondness, as is the polished ensemble comedy of its four principals. Its best jokes aren't transcribable because they sit in the air between the characters, but I laughed. No sign of freezer burn.

Based on Chris O'Dowd's experiences growing up in Ireland in the Eighties (and filmed in the town he grew up in), Moone Boy is - theoretically at least - a slightly risky proposition in some respects. For one thing, it exploits a private nostalgia for a public audience (and nostalgia can easily get self-indulgent). For another, it employs a lot of child actors, which can be tricky when it comes to comic delivery. In practice though Moone Boy is entirely lovable, one of those comedies that you actually feel a slightly better person for liking.

The comedy is centred around Martin, a young boy growing up with three unrelentingly scornful sisters (Trisha, Fidelma and Sinead) and taking refuge in doodled cartoons and the comforting presence of an imaginary friend, played by O'Dowd himself. Martin is bottom of the pecking order at home and not much higher at school, but he has a resilient can-do perkiness that appears to carry him through (and which can, if one's absolutely honest, sometimes be a tiny bit off-putting). If the comedy was only about him it wouldn't work anything like as well (the alter ego device doesn't deliver as big a pay-off in laughs as you might expect). But it diverts in quite unexpected ways. In the first episode, for example, a run-in with the school bullies triggered a lovely running joke about Irish manhood. Confronting the father of the bullies, Martin's dad is startled to encounter a paragon of sympathy instead of a brute ("Oh no! They're awful aren't they?"). He then finds himself enlisted to a secret self-help group for the town's patriarchally challenged.

The comedy of childhood is nicely done, too. Faking a love letter to his sister as part of a complicated deal to enlist the protection of the school's tough guy, Martin searches for the highest praise he can think of and comes up with "you smell nicer than crisps". But it's the sense of the family and community around him that really makes the thing work. In the second episode of the opening double-bill, Martin's mother came to the fore, campaigning with other women in the town to get Mary Robinson elected to the Irish presidency. "I won't vote for her for President," says one of the women they canvass, "but I'll vote for her to be the President's wife." And Steve Coogan - whose company Baby Cow makes the programme, appeared in a very funny cameo as a notoriously gropey local plutocrat. It's sweet-natured, fresh and absolutely not by-the-numbers, and if you want to bully it you'll have to get past me first.

Malcolm returned in The Thick of It, his early melancholy dispelled by his decision that it's time to evict Nicola Murray from her post as Leader of the Opposition. "She's electoral asbestos," he tells a fellow plotter. "She's going to sleep with the fishes. Or at least witter on at them until they lose the fucking will to live." The Thick of It isn't sweet or lovable and hasn't a fraction of Moone Boy's essential good-heartedness. I don't think it's forgiving or tender to any of its characters. But it doesn't need to be because it offers an unceasing stream of savagely funny lines. "I can't even see the clicking of the pilot light," Malcolm said disgustedly, as he searched in Nicola's eyes for the "fire" of political passion. Difficult to like him, but almost as hard not to laugh.

The weekend's viewing: Moone Boy; The Thick of It

Moone Boy is one of those comedies that you actually feel a better person for liking.

The Thick of It is back, with a coalition government to play with. As you might expect, it's scabrously funny, stuffed with great lines and a pleasure to watch. But - and "but" is not a word I like using about this series - it's also possible to wonder whether it might be suffering from the need to live up to its own reputation. The insults are great, but dialogue that consists almost entirely of insults doesn't quite ring true politically... nor the open contempt and hostility with which the two parties to this arranged marriage treat each other.

I found myself wondering whether there wouldn't have been more comedy in a failed attempt to conceal political differences rather than this gleefully violent expression of them. Peter Mannion's meltdown in front of a class of teenagers didn't convince either, not because you can't imagine a politician knowing nothing about the policy he's launching, but because he would be far more skilled at saying absolutely nothing fluently. That said, it still has more laughs in 10 minutes than most comedies manage in 30.

Whether you like Bad Education, Jack Whitehall and Freddy Syborn's schoolroom comedy, will rather depend on how susceptible you are to the charms of Jack Whitehall, who plays Alfie, a feckless man/child teacher who is less interested in teaching his charges than getting them to help him win the affections of Miss Gulliver. This week, the class was off on a school field trip to the Tring Ink Museum and Petting Zoo, even less alluring than it might sound because an outbreak of worms has forced management to introduce a "look but don't touch" policy. Whitehall's character wobbles a little between a knowing cynicism and an over-contrived ingenuousness, but the comedy certainly has its moments. When the assembled pupils are asked if they have any questions by the Ink Museum's depressive manager, he gets this fine example of youthful curiosity: "Would you rather be a dog with a boy's head or a boy with a dog's head?" Takes some answering, that one.

I've steered clear of The Angelos Epithemiou Show because it looked bullying in the pre-publicity, one of those performances in which a comic apes a slow-witted character and in doing so licenses cruelty to those who actually are. It's not quite that (though it definitely hovers dangerously close at times). But it isn't easy to pigeonhole what it is instead. The format is cod interview show, but on the evidence of Friday's show at least Renton Skinner isn't quite nimble enough to take advantage of the liberties his mouth-breathing alter ego gives him. Tellingly, Theo Paphitis got in the sharpest line in his appearance, with Skinner reduced to rather feeble ad libs ("I bought a new bow the other day," said Paphitis when he was asked how he spent his money. "All right, Robin Hood," replied Angelos).

It also owes a considerable debt to Reeves and Mortimer-style mucking about (Skinner served an apprentice as guest clown on Shooting Stars) and these elements are more successful, even if they wildly overestimate the comic payload of stage explosives. Keying up the second half, Epithemiou announced that "for all you metrosexuals out there I will be showing you how to exfoliate", a promise illustrated with footage of him appearing, fully dressed, from between the rollers of a functioning carwash. That made me laugh and Adeel Akhtar is very funny too as Angelos's sidekick Gupta. If there was more of him, I might watch it again.

Vexed is a strange affair, a comedy-drama about an odd-couple pair of police detectives that doesn't seem to have entirely resolved how comic or dramatic it wants to be. The essential dynamic has a self-regarding Eighties male throwback teamed up with an ambitious young female officer, a contrast heightened yesterday because the case involved a university gender studies course. Unfortunately, there's something genuinely ugly about Jack's dinosaur misogyny and the drama itself seems no less old fashioned in its attitude to women. At one moment, Jack's partner, Georgina, is excoriating him for his chauvinism, at the next she's simpering gratefully because he's praised her breasts. A bitter man-hating lesbian straight out of stock cupboard didn't help much either, or the decidedly foxed satire on academic life. It doesn't make sense and because of that it doesn't make you laugh.

Celebrity Bedlam review

To be fair to those involved here, pretty much everyone expressed some doubt about what they were being asked to do. "This is all true, this is?" asked Howard from the Halifax ads, before doing a piece to camera for a children's science programme, about bats with human testicles.