Victoria Wood (II)

Video: Victoria Wood interview

Victoria Wood's new drama Loving Miss Hatto airs on BBC1 on 23 December 2012. The story of an "ordinary" couple who managed to pull of the greatest fraud in classical music, it is an honest and sympathetic portrayal of love, life, fate and opportunity. Guardian TV editor Vicky Frost caught up with writer Victoria Wood earlier this year.

Victoria Wood narrates the final episode of this toe-warming series looking back at the finest comedy double act this country has ever produced. Tonight we take a look at their flawless Christmas specials over the years. There is nothing on earth that could make you feel more Christmassy. Guest stars including Angela Rippon and Penelope Keith reminisce, while famous fans watch rare and unbroadcast sketches with all the wonder of a five-year-old on Christmas morning.

Tonight BBC Two celebrates the life of Dad's Army actor Clive Dunn who died last month at the age of 92. There are endless repeats to remind us just how popular Dad's Army was but the figures make it abundantly clear: the show ran for nine series, pulled in audiences of 18 million and came fourth in a 2004 BBC poll of Britain's best sitcoms. Like all good comedies, Dad's Army's success lay with its characters, a ramshackle bunch of Home Guard volunteers, with none more pleasing than Dunn's doddery Lance Corporal Jack Jones.

Dunn will be best remembered for that iconic role but he found later success from an unlikely source - a chart-topping single, Grandad. He pursued this theme several years later when he starred in the popular children's sitcom, also called Grandad. The evening kicks off at 7.30pm with a repeat of The Dad's Army Story presented by Victoria Wood, complete with interviews from the (then surviving) cast including Dunn himself. There's a classic episode to follow, which sees the Dad's Army crew take on a rival regiment to prove their mettle. And we end the night with a one-off documentary in which Dunn's friends, family and colleagues share memories of his life and work.

The seasonal return of the Little Crackers series, which features comedy shorts based on the autobiographical recollections of various actors and comedians. Previous participants have included Stephen Fry, Victoria Wood, Jack Whitehall and Sheridan Smith. This latest series begins with Joanna Lumley's Baby, Be Blonde, in which the 19-year-old Jo (Ottilie Mackintosh) is a struggling model who gets a break when she buys a blonde wig. "It didn't, but it made me feel that I had changed the course of my life," says Lumley in the behind-the-scenes film which follows the short. Also starring this week in later episodes are Rebecca Front and Caroline Quentin.

Enfield and Whitehouse return with more silly voices and flashes of comic inspiration (amid, it has to be said, the odd clunker). Probably the best sketch has a lovely cameo from Victoria Wood, who combines with Enfield to play the Minor Royals, a pair of hopeless toffs visiting a corner shop and simply adoring its ethnic ambience ("Mmm, what an exotic aroma... What a wonderful place Willesden is!"). And there's an enjoyable Killing-inspired spoof of the BBC's love affair with all things Danish.

Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday) seem to have moved to my north-west London manor. Oi, that's the bus stop up the road. "What a wonderful place Willesden is," says Victoria Wood who joins in to play, alongside Harry, a pair of minor royals, visiting a corner shop in a less salubrious part of town than they're used to. It's one of the hits.

What, hit and miss? A sketch show? Really? Of course it is. You could even argue that this kind of traditional sketch show shouldn't have much of a future. But television would be poorer without Harry & Paul, because it can be so good.

It's not about the gags - if you looked at the script, you would probably just think: eh? It's all about the characters, and the interaction of the characters. Enfield and Whitehouse don't just dress up and put on silly voices, they possess their characters. The hits are big hits. "Probable quare" still makes me laugh. And the one at the end where it all goes Nordic noir is a joy.

They're now more classic than cutting edge, but it's good to have Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse back for a fourth series of their sketch show. Tonight they revisit old ground (their spoof of Dragons' Den) and break out some new characters. Victoria Wood joins in for a dig at the minor royals, and there is a send-up of Question Time.

Isy Suttie: 'I'd love to work with Victoria Wood'

She's a trained musician and wanted to be a singer. But when people laughed at her silly, twisted songs, Isy Suttie took up comedy. Brian Logan talks to the Peep Show star about her brutal new show.

Craig Hill talks about his comedy hero Victoria Wood

'It's all about delivery, tight writing and use of language.'

The newest thing in comedy sketch shows - and doesn't that very phrase feel antediluvian? - is Watson & Oliver, well known to Edinburgh Fringe audiences. They're an appealing duo. Ingrid Oliver has a thrillingly low voice - Fiona Bruce meets Victoria Coren - she's a dead ringer for Myleene Klass (who is duly ridiculed), and she can really act. Lorna Watson is blond, brittle and has to work harder for laughs. Their opening gambit was a direly old-fashioned bit of sub-Morecambe & Wise before-the-show backchat, but, once they settled down, their sketches were inventive and unusual. In a spoof of a TV Jane Austen serial, the mob-capped duo tittered like six-year-olds about pin cushions to a pair of bored Mr Darcys, then switched abruptly to double entendre. ("Our dance cards - we eagerly await the filling of our slots by two special gentlemen.") A Victoria Wood-style pastiche of 1950s ladies' kitchen conversation - all pinnies and hair-rollers - was surreally punctuated by Watson's response-appropriate eyebrows. A greasy-spoon café became a symphony of shouts and orders in which everyone called everyone else "darling" - "Cup o'tea, darlin'?" "Keep the change, my darlin'" - until someone silenced the room by saying "Love". In what is clearly meant to be the show's signature sketch, the girls do their impression of Prince William and Kate tucked up in bed, unable to find anything to talk about except their wedding day. But couldn't they have found a better punchline subject than Pippa Middleton's over-prodded rump?

The best sketch imagined two Playboy bunnies squeaking competitively about how pink their living quarters were, how appealing their fake boobs, how delightful their lives, until they were summoned to cuddle up to the saurian Hefner. Between retchings, they competed as to which had a better excuse not to fulfil this noisome duty. It was a gift of a subject to these two funny, appealing women, and they seized it with unladylike glee. I look forward to seeing a lot more of them.