Tom Sutcliffe

Well, The Sarah Millican Television Programme made me laugh. Her delivery is a bit tele-prompter stiff for the straight-to-camera sections and the format is a bit woolly (bit of Harry Hill telly commentary, bit of Graham Norton tease-the-guest), but she's funny. "A four-foot child can fit in the mouth of a hippopotamus," she said, apropos of nothing. "I'm guessing that whoever found that out isn't allowed to baby-sit anymore."

With regards to Dirk Gently, there's nothing wrong with the actors Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd and some nice moments from Howard Overman's script. It's just that those qualities in the end spread a little too thinly over a nonsensical thriller plot.

It's supposed to be nonsensical, of course - Dirk's belief that "everything is interconnected" pretty much necessitating a chain of wildly improbable coincidences and consequences. But since anything can happen you don't very much care about anything that does, and Dirk's metaphysical musings about "Zen navigation" and the complexity of the world begin to get repetitious quite quickly. There were laughs, including a nice reveal when Mangan opened a Valentine's card in the middle of a complacent speech about his powers of attraction to find that the inscription inside read "I hate you, you're a pig". But they were far too widely spaced in a script that could have done with a lot more editing. Scorning someone's belief in astrology, Dirk asked him whether he really believed that planets "billions of light years" away could affect human destiny. Millions of miles would cover it, Dirk, and yes, you might justly point out that this scientific pedantry is irrelevant. But I probably wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't used the same phrase three times. Or if I'd been laughing enough to distract myself.

The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff is stuffed with plot but gets away with it because that's one of the essential gags. As a spoof of the intricately engineered clockwork of a Dickens novel, full of sudden revelations and shock reversals, it could hardly be any other way. And in any case, it always takes care to have a joke on hand to lubricate every narrative turn. So, when Conceptiva Secret-Past and her daughter Victoria use Primly Tightclench's deportment volumes to bludgeon their way past the baddies you get a quick close-up of the titles they've picked: "How to Hurt a Large Man" and "Self Defence for Girls". I wasn't entirely sure about the first one-off special of Mark Evans's comedy at Christmas, but it's far easier to surrender to its silliness now that it's been sliced up into half-hour portions.

The cast is excellent, with Robert Webb relishing the possibilities for guileless credulity and Tim McInnerny chewing the carpet (in a splendid way) as the dastardly Harmswell Grimstone. At one point last night, he paused in the middle of a triumphant cackle as if something was missing, stroked his upper lip and said pensively: "I really must grow a moustache to twirl." I enjoyed the trial scene a lot too, in which Harmswell arrived understandably confident that he would prevail. The judge was called Harshmore Grimstone and he'd taken advantage of the immemorial right of every Englishman to be tried by a jury of his cousins.

Watching Watson & Oliver, I just find myself thinking how old-fashioned the format is. The awkward-intro routine was getting a bit old when Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith did it back in the late Eighties and the comic dynamic seems too obviously indebted to French and Saunders. They are both talented, though - comic actresses as well as comedians. A more up-to-date vehicle would help.

Review: Dirk Gently, Bleak Old Shop, Watson & Oliver

How much plot can a comedy sustain before it starts to get stodgy?

Pramface, BBC3's new comedy, wants to be The Inbetweeners so much it hurts. It features two callow schoolboys and, a minor twist, a female friend who is superior to both in wit and wisdom and carries a secret torch for the male lead, Jamie. But Jamie hasn't noticed and so, after crashing a post-exam party, loses his virginity to Laura, in a sequence that struck me as being overly generous to those who might get their kicks from watching teenagers have orgasms. If it really was Jamie's first time I doubt that it would have lasted long enough for the montage sequence here, in which his impressively extended gurnings were intercut with the masturbatory grimaces of his friend Michael and Beth's attempts to get out of the room without being noticed. The point of the thing is that posh, sophisticated Laura finds herself pregnant with gauche, ordinary Jamie's baby, so last night was really just a kind of sitcom artificial insemination. But the young actors play it nicely and the script has its moments. "I have to let the women come to me and slightly ignore them... like the horse whisperer," says Michael, whose confidence in his powers of seduction turns out to be wildly misplaced.

Kevin Bridges: What's the Story? review

It's supposed to be fatal to explain a joke, but Kevin Bridges doesn't seem unduly anxious that he's going to kill his comedy.

I'm not sure you could kill the jokes in Roger & Val Have Just Got In by explaining them, because there is nothing really to explain except a vague prevailing mood. Beth and Emma Kilcoyne's two-hander returned with Roger fretfully facing an unfair dismissal tribunal and Val excitedly looking forward to an interview for a deputy-headship. As before, they bickered, they procrastinated and, rather sweetly, bucked each other up. And then, right at the end, Roger looked out through the net curtains and saw something that appalled him. Given the way the characters regularly confuse the banal with the earth-shattering it might just be a wilting plant, but it would be worth watching next week either way to find out. It's so low-key it's almost not there, but what is there is great.

The weekend's viewing: Cricklewood Greats, Sun, BBC4

Pastiche is a pretty unforgiving form of comedy.

Noel Fielding's new comedy is inescapably whimsical - if you mean by that, capricious in its inventions and logic. Part of the point of it is its zany fecundity - the fact that you simply can't predict at any moment what will crop up next. But that's also one of its weaknesses, since pretty much nothing is inadmissable. I've even heard fellow comedians get testy about the style, parodying the burbling chain of nonsense that emerges when its practitioners are on song. And it isn't that it doesn't make you laugh, more that you can't quite work out why you did once you've stopped.