Tom Sutcliffe

The current series of Grandma's House ended last night. At least I hope "current series" is accurate because Dan Swimer and Simon Amstell's comedy keeps getting better, its account of repressed feeling and family in-fighting beautifully discordant (the signature tune is perfect). Last night tuned the self-knowledge to an even higher pitch: "That would have been very funny if you'd laughed," Amstell told his mother, after accusing her of compensating for her own disappointing life by obsessing over his career. "Your silence made it seem a bit mean." And then it ended with him glumly watching an old Never Mind the Buzzcocks performance on YouTube, his dreams of love and happiness having evaporated. Hard to believe one laughs at all, really, but I did. A lot.

There can be a lot of fun for a comedy actor, offering a space where the performer isn't obliged to share the credit for a laugh with the writer. There were two good examples in this week's Episodes, in which Stephen Mangan plays one half of a sitcom-writing team. The first was one of his specialities as an actor - the facial expression of a wrestling match between baser instincts and finer ones, played out here when he's offered a free sports car by the Hollywood star who broke up his marriage. The second came from Daisy Haggard, who played an irretrievably dim American executive giving notes after a script run-through. The line wasn't bad - "Page 18?... will anyone know who Rudyard Kipling is?" - but it was the long pause as she tried to work out how to respond to a counter-argument that was really funny. As Episodes can be, incidentally, when it doesn't get carried away with self-reference.

I'm not really sure about Cardinal Burns, E4's new sketch show, but I think it's a good sign that it had turned me from bemusement to gentle chuckling in the course of a single episode. And, thinking about it further, bemusement isn't the worst state a comedy show can leave you in. Belly laughs are fine, but there's something about a sketch that leaves you wondering exactly why you're smiling, particularly when they're as well performed as this.

Starlings, Matt King and Steve Edge's new series for Sky1, is what you might call acoustic guitar comedy. You don't get a laugh-track, you get Bon Iver singing something plangent over a low-key (and slightly over-crowded) family drama. It is very sweet, which is both praise and blame, since the absence of sharp edge may not be to everyone's taste. "Need more warm," says one character as he shuffles off to top up his partner's birthing pool. No. Need more hot and cold.

In Grandma's House, Tanya worries almost constantly about her son Simon, whether it's to do with his faltering career or a fallow patch in his sex life. The self-reflexive comedy has got even more so for the second series, with "Amstell" the character responding to reactions to the performance of Amstell the actor: "It's good acting! I'm doing vulnerability... I'm stiff in real life!" he protests, after Tanya questions his suitability for the family comedy he's just sold to the BBC. I'm not convinced that Tanya's ghastly boyfriend, Clive, would have been quite so jocular about Simon's one-night stand with a 16-year-old ("If there's grass on the wicket, let's play cricket," he says, in blokey solidarity). But it's very funny all the same.

Last night's viewing: Derek, Channel 4

If you were feeling very kind indeed, you might want to give Ricky Gervais credit for trying. But I don't think you'd conclude that he'd succeeded.

Last night's viewing: The Matt Lucas Awards, BBC1

Are the guests' suggestions their own, or are they supplied for them? It doesn't look as if they care much either way, to be honest.

The weekend's viewing: Twenty Twelve, Fri, BBC2

If we didn't have the Olympics, we wouldn't have John Morton's Twenty Twelve, a mock-documentary about a fictional Olympic Deliverance Committee. It didn't make a huge amount of noise when it originally came out on BBC4, but aficionados will already know it's one of the funniest things on television.

The notional rationalisation for putting Just a Minute on television is to celebrate the cult programme's 45th anniversary. But having watched one episode, I can't really think of any good reason other than that of adding vision to what is a quintessentially radio experience. It's true that tickets for recordings of the show are always wildly over-subscribed, so someone may have thought there's an appetite to be fed. But that misses the point that a radio recording offers devotees added value in terms of off-mic remarks and general larking about. Here, that's all been tidied away, and the only advance is that Nicholas Parsons doesn't have to explain the audience laughter when one of the panelists pulls a face. A mystifying commission.

In Hit the Road Jack, Jack Whitehall offers us a hybrid stand-up/chat-show/prank-sketch/national-tour format in which none of the components entirely works. If you like him you'll probably quite like the series too, though even if that's the case you might feel they could tighten up the candid-camera sections. If you can see the "dupe" trying not to crack up it's hard to feel they've been duped at all.