7 Day Saturday

Mine are the spooky, hand-drawn 1971 animation of A Christmas Carol, the Corgi Rocket Skypark and Jona Lewie's Stop the Cavalry, but what are your festive best-evers? In the fun format of this hour-long special, Al (Pub landlord) Murray is joined by fellow stand-ups Andy Zaltzman, Tiff Stevenson and Kevin Day to look back at Christmas TV, toys and number ones.

Plenty of scope for gags and mickey-taking there, from Clackers to Cabbage Patch Dolls, and There's No One Quite like Grandma to Mr Blobby. And who do you allow into your home on the big day: the Time Lord, the Countess of Grantham, or the Queen? The (hopefully) good-natured discussions start here.

And yes, I know Stop the Cavalry wasn't a number one. But in my mind it always will be.

Al Murray: I pride myself on being uncertain

The Pub Landlord puts down his pint glass and declares what's wrong with British satire.

Al Murray: Comedy's role is to lampoon politics

Al Murray, the comic behind the stand-up creation The Pub Landlord, has criticised as "ridiculous" other comedians who embrace political views.

7 Day Sunday, hosted by self-confessed sports ignoramus Chris Addison, provides a humorous look at the week's news. Watch out for regular panellist Sarah Millican - a really good female comedian. We should expect to see a lot more of her. If you listen to it as a podcast there's extra material as an added treat.

The Christian O'Connell Solution - a show so forced and unfunny I used to stare, disbelieving, at the radio - has departed, replaced by Chris Addison's 7 Day Sunday. It's an hour of quips about the headlines or, as Addison put it: "God said, let there be a radio programme in which four idiots are facetious about the week's news."

It's really quite funny, and comprehensive in its sweep of topics. Venezuela's President Chavez was deemed "fantastically leftfield"; Italian television was described as being mostly "prank-based"; and postmen and women, we were informed, "excrete red rubber bands" when nervous. You sort of have to be there, listening intently, to get the four-way chat (with regulars Andy Zaltzman and Sarah Millican plus a weekly guest). It's quite involved: if you lose yourself in the papers for a minute, you will miss hefty chunks.

The departure of the dismal, desperate The Christian O'Connell Solution (so good when he was running Fighting Talk; so bad when trying to raise a laugh about the week's news) on Radio 5 Live gave space to Chris Addison and 7 Day Sunday (11am). Things did not start well the first week, what with Kate Silverton, whose rather excellent news and politics-based programme precedes it, announcing it as The Christian O'Connell Solution, doubtless leading millions of potential listeners to switch off.

Then the programme came, and it seemed as though some genius had decided that the best way to better the Solution was to duplicate it. Addison and his primary guests, fellow comedians Sarah Millican and Andy Zaltzman, adopted a turgid pattern of one of them - usually Addison - talking and the others laughing. Always beware the comedy show in which the participants laugh; they're usually doing it so the listener doesn't have to.

But the diligent listener persevered - Addison is a funny man, Millican is a funny woman, and Zaltzman loves cricket, so one is predisposed to forgive him for being apparently unable to be funny on the hoof rather than off a prepared script. But episode two was just as dreary. The biggest laughs, in one quarter at least, came for the story about a hippo that floated out of a zoo during heavy rains. But there's no chemistry on display here, none of The News Quiz-esque scoring of laughter points, where clever people fall over each other in their desperation to be funnier than the last. I'd give it one more week and then find something else to do for an hour on Sunday morning. Go to church, maybe.

Chris Addison, the comedian who plays the weedy Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, has been given his own topical news show on Five Live, 7 Day Sunday.

As usual, there is a certain amount of "category error" in this choice. As Ollie in The Thick of It, Addison is hilariously funny, but this is because his lines are written by the comic genius Armando Iannucci. On 7 Day Sunday, however, Addison is writing his own lines, assisted by a studio gang who would laugh at a pig's bladder on a stick. On The Thick of It there is snappy dialogue at a thousand miles an hour, but if you talk like that on radio without enough jokes or substance then the listener's mind skitters all over the place trying to concentrate, before giving up. The show's brief was to "pull apart the week's big news stories", but in the event the only news covered was snow. Weirdly for someone who made his name in a political satire there wasn't any. Why not? The Gordon Brown coup should have provided acres of material, but it took ages to get round to, and then got a paltry two minutes.

As with all the other new shows, I feel strongly that one should not judge on the basis of a debut. Addison is witty and will certainly improve when he starts to take things a little slower. But unless he cracks down on the nervous giggling, his team will still sound like they're stuck in a small lift, supplied with nitrous oxide instead of oxygen.

Chris Addison, columnist and comedian (from The Thick of It and Lab Rats, not to mention his frequent appearances all over this network), gets his own show, a review of the week's big stories. Fellow comedians Andy Zaltzman and Sarah Millican are regular guests, there's to be a special star each week too.