Zoe Williams (I)

Heading Out was nosing toward disaster, but could have pulled back from the brink until the arrival this week of protagonist Sara's French ex-girlfriend. Some of her exes are walking cliches, and some are exercises in surrealism, and the unlucky ones are both, but at least the only one some schmuck has to bring alive is the French one, who is angry for no reason, stays for no reason and shouts for no reason, unless "we want to remake 'Allo 'Allo with lesbians" is the underlying reason, in which case, I will grudgingly remove my hat.

The jokes are stale, the punchlines are awkwardly delivered, as if the actors are deservedly ashamed, the tropes are two decades old (a therapist with made-up qualifications and a drum? Why stop there? Where's the critical mother who wants to be a grandmother, what about a nice lady vicar who likes a drink, we could use a spoilt Sloane Ranger here, if anyone's got a moment, SOMEONE CALL FRENCH AND SAUNDERS. Ask them if they've got any ideas left over from 1987).

It takes a special sort of show to make a comedy out of a bomb disposal unit in contemporary Afghanistan; a show that dives into the dark, dank hollows of a man's heart, then drags its way painfully out, up the ridges of thwarted hope and bitter laughter. Or else, you could do it Dad's Army-style, using the war mainly for uniforms and comedic scenarios, making sure the only people who die are idiots or invisible insurgents in far-off sheds. That's what BBC3's Bluestone 42 (pronounced four-two, if you want to pretend you watched it, and not watch it) has done: it's very broad and kind, and I was impressed by it. It was confident and deft, and brooked no squeamishness, no uncertainty about which jokes you're allowed to make and which you aren't (though there's one running gag, in which a squaddie mocks a dead American and is persistently told that it's too soon, that one infers was generated by the writing process.

"A suicide bomb? Would that be funny, if it only got adults?" "Too soon.") It's by the Miranda writing team, and has that distinctive worldview in which people are basically nice, and the comedy comes from the degrees of absurdity by which that niceness is manifested. And, like Miranda, a lot of its watchability comes not from actual laughs, but from enjoying the company of the nice people. Inevitably, however, this means that it never gets anywhere near the bone, and has none of that wincing discomfort that has one, while watching Peep Show or The Thick of It, literally drawing away from the telly, crying. While on the one hand it feels unfair to judge all comedy by the best of it, I sometimes think television could apply some industry standards, and learn from itself, like science.

Some joke structures persistently don't work; they clank along the ground like an exhaust pipe falling off a van. I'm thinking in particular of the Socratic school of joke, demonstrated here when phlegmatic and likable Katie Lyons (playing a soldier called Bird) hefts down the material for this exchange like a scree: "So you've never named anything?" she asks another soldier. "Nothing except my cock, which is called Andy McNab." "Why would you name your cock Andy McNab?" Because of all the action it's seen ... because it would survive on nuts and berries ... because it's full of bollocks ... I'm paraphrasing but, seriously, it's only one rung above a knock-knock joke. In short, it could be harder on itself, and harder on the viewer, and probably a bit harder on the cast, and we would still like it, and maybe love it.

TV review: The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff

The cast is stellar and the acting's great. Shame the script is so bland and unfunny.

Heard the one about the leftwing comedians?

Leftwing comedians are staging a comeback and thriving in Cameron's Britain...

Rob Brydon: comedy's Mr Nice Guy

Calling Steve Coogan 'a bit of a turnip' is about as nasty as he can get.

You have to give sitcoms a chance, a huge chance. You have to take the amount of time you'd give, say, a prospective brother-in-law, and multiply that by the number of characters there are. Because eventually, once you've got to know them, you're going to find them a lot funnier.

This is the theory. I've heard it expounded a lot - although, admittedly, mainly by one person who works in TV. But trying not to fall into the trap of hating everything immediately, there are bits of Trollied (Sky 1) that are a little lazy; the plotting is a bit half-cocked. Jane Horrocks's interim manager is about to have a party, and she gets blown out by everybody, including her sister; she immediately swallows her pride and asks the guys on the butchery counter, and they immediately say no.

Computer programmers talk about the "five whys": so that if you ask "why" once, then you might partly mend a bug in a program, but if you ask it five times, then you'll probably design something quite good. It's a bit random, but try deploying it in a script meeting. Why do all her guests blow her out? Why is she so desperate to have the party in the first place? Why would she invite two people who manifestly dislike her, when she has a whole supermarket full of underlings? Why, when she's apparently quite a flexible person who finds it easy to put her vanity aside, doesn't she have more friends? Why did they cast Horrocks in the first place? Is it just because every time they thought "supermarket", they got a visual picture of her wrinkling her pretty nose and arguing with Prunella Scales?

I strongly suspect that the answer to all these questions is "We don't know" and that, furthermore, if this was a computer program, it would work for about five minutes, and then it would wipe your hard drive.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at its puerile humour, sometimes out loud. Two check-out ladies, discussing Woody Allen, agree that running off with your stepdaughter is creepy, then one of them throws in: "I gave my cousin a handjob once, in a caravan." OK, it's not Oscar Wilde. And nor is the extremely extended wordplay between two homophonous phrases, one of which is qwite wude. (Horrocks is the interim deputy manager, and says "while I'm interimming . . .", whereupon the butchers go "loads of people are into rimming" and she says, "you need to face up to the fact that I'm the only one who's interimming", and they fall about. And so did I. I'm not proud of it). Nevertheless, I'm afraid it didn't really grow on me for its second episode, and its obvious antecedents - it's trying so hard to be The Office that it has Ricky Gervais's face tattooed, metaphorically, across its own - grated a bit. The Dawn-and-Tim-alike romance is particularly plain, and I don't think it really benefits from the unavoidable comparison. Though you never know, watch it a bit longer, you may come to love them.

Beaver Falls (E4) is a slick-looking comedy about three recent graduates from Oxford Brookes University, teaching at an American summer camp. It took me ages to unpick: was it an American idealisation of British culture? Or an English idealisation of American culture? Finally, I worked it out: this is a British look at the US, based on a premise with which you may or may not agree; that American summer camps are inherently, Lord-of-the-Flies-ly fascinating.

But there's a sting in the tail: somewhere near the end of the first episode, it turns into plucky, UK underdog spirit, standing up for the American underdogs against the improbable sadism of their jocks. It is a frankly pretty weird attempt to interpolate our own sensibility into an American combative trope - jock v nerd - that we don't even fully understand, that we've just picked up off the telly. I would like to see a bit of psychoanalysis on the writing team: it's like a child's impulse to wriggle between warring parents. It's none of our business, mate! We don't have jocks or nerds, we don't have people who are strong or people who are good at stuff. We're irrelevant to this dyad. And it's irrelevant to us.

Well, of course that wouldn't matter if the writing were good, which it isn't, or if the situations were tickling, which they aren't (one of the major events is someone wanking on to a flip-flop: I don't want to be tediously pragmatic here, but it's a wipe-clean surface. Semen, on a wipe-clean surface: where is the drama?). I'm sorry to say, though, that I was won over by the acting in the end. Arsher Ali, memorable in Four Lions, is even more striking here, with no competition from the script or the other actors. Although, if I'm honest, I ended up warming to the other two (Samuel Robertson and John Dagleish) as well.

TV review: My Favourite Joke

Splicing a joke with a load of talking heads is like kicking it to death. By the time they get to the punchline, it's barely funny.

The Marriage Ref is perplexingly bad. Couples arrive with a problem that is either banal (she won't tidy her room) or manufactured (he won't stop doing magic tricks), Jimmy Carr and Jack Dee try to be funny and Katherine Kelly makes inane side-chat, having signed one of those standard TV contracts in which a woman is required to be exactly as boring as her male counterpart is funny. Dermot O'Leary I can understand, he has the clean features for such mid-evening blather, Carr has always struck me as a man who would sell an organ if the price was right, but Dee? How broke can he be? Is he trying to set up an orphanage? What's going on?

In with the Flynns (BBC1) is bland, smooth and unremarkable. You would call it a sitcom designed by a committee, were it not for the fact that programmes with a lot of writers tend to be quite good. There's a family, without much money: the kids say the darndest things and the teenager gets a piercing. The father's adult brother lives among them, I think in an attempt to splice the eternal humour of the family unit with some of the classic larks of Men Behaving Badly.

The acting is not great. The kids are not great. Are you even allowed to slag off child actors? Is that like saying you don't think Pippa Middleton's all that? Will Mellor's long-suffering but chirpy dad has a portfolio of exaggerated hand-gestures that he borrowed off the 1970s: the "what's he like?" backward thumb point; the "I don't know why I bother" flap. Somebody on the set should be poking him with a stick, saying: "Have you ever seen anybody do that? Anybody in real life?"

It is unfair to single any of them out, though, since the problem is the set-up: if they want us to fall in love with the Flynns, as one might a regular family, beset by tribulations but battling through, yik yak yik yak, then they need to be a bit more like actual people. And if they want us to fall about, like we're watching Miranda, only without the hassle of getting the actual Miranda, then it has to be funny.

So, take this snatch of dialogue: "Your perfume is exquisite." "Actually, that might be Brasso". No two people in the history of enlarged frontal lobes have ever had that exchange: yet where's the thrill, the intoxication, the certain something that makes up for how unlikely it is? I think there should be a litmus test for all sitcoms; is it as funny as a kitten falling down the back of a sofa? Nope? Well, then, back to the drawing board, or we need to start paying more for home videos. It would save so much human endeavour. And the kittens would be doing that stuff anyway.