Little Crackers

Grumpy seems to be Jo Brand's default setting, and this comic short focusing on a pivotal moment of her young life may explain her apparent resignation to life being a series of injustices. If it wasn't hard enough that she and her family have to move home due to money problems, her beloved cat then vanishes. Even when her fortunes then take a turn for the better and she makes a new pal, that brief moment of happiness is punctured by an incident involving her missing moggy...

Christmas, as we all know, is about buying stuff for yourself - especially if it's the latest gadget that will improve your life beyond compare. Here Bill's desperate to give his credit card a good stretch by nabbing the XGP9, a gizmo that will do everything you can imagine and remind you when it's time to buy more milk. Technology isn't so keen on Bill, though, because his efforts to use plastic for his purchase fail miserably, and then he's trapped in a car park due to a disagreement with a ticket machine.

Two excellent autobiographical shorts in the Little Crackers season beginning with Stephen Fry recalling his time as a rule-breaker at his strict public school (the young Fry winningly played by Daniel Roche). Then, at 9.15pm, Kathy Burke remembers the final day of school exams when all she could dream of being was a writer for the NME.

The way Stephen Fry's turned out, who would have thought he was a precocious blighter cheekier than a building site in summer? You'd have thought teachers would have adored a pupil who could correct them all the time. Yet that wasn't the case, as this fine comedy set in a 1960s boarding school finds a young Fry (Daniel Roche, monopolising the cheeky posh boy roles now that he's the lead in Just William, too) in bother with his headmaster (Stephen Fry). Disappointed with the tuck shop offerings, young Fry heads further afield to procure fresh sugary supplies, but when he's caught getting sweets from the village, he's faced with a choice - will he 'fess up, or use new boy Bunce as a patsy?

Little Crackers review: Short and Sweet

Obviously Stephen Fry and Kathy Burke deserve much credit for their excellent work, but knocking up short scripts like these shouldn't have been too demanding for such talented thespians. The real credit should probably go to Sky for commissioning this original format.

The excellent Little Crackers series continues with two more autobiographical comic shorts. First, at 9.00pm, Jo Brand takes us back to 1972, a time when fondue sets were all the rage and the comedian was a hormonal teenager sulking because her parents had moved house. Then, in the second of tonight's instalments at 9.15pm, Bill Bailey plays a modern-day Scrooge who finds himself trapped in an underground car park.

A premature maternal loss featured in The Giddy Kipper - Victoria Wood's contribution to Little Crackers, Sky's season of short festive dramas, which she'd introduced by saying, "It is - in a lot of ways - my childhood." In fact, Wood's mother didn't die when she was a child, so this account of a solitary little girl excluded from the Sunday school treat by a vindictive teacher can't have been directly autobiographical. It included a lovely moment of fantasy, when winter dark transformed into daylight and the central character found herself briefly reunited with her mother. Touching enough anytime, but particularly poignant if you'd seen Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.

More remembrances of things past, this time from Jo Brand and Bill Bailey. Brand sets the controls for the heart of 1972 where her teenage self is having a bad time of it. Her family has money worries, they are moving town and she's being bullied at her new school - until she meets her saviour Susan Pigg. Bailey takes a different approach to the other Little Crackers by not setting his story in his childhood. He plays himself, a grouch who doesn't know the meaning of Christmas spirit.

Running nightly this week are this year's seasonal shorts little crackers from Sky One, which annually tries to make up for the dearth of decent original drama and comedy from January-November by gorging us with a festive selection box featuring some of the best-known names in the business.

This time they've got the likes of Victoria Wood, Catherine Tate, Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke, Julian Barratt, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey - oh, the list goes on, basically anyone who's ever appeared on a panel game is either appearing in, writing or directing one of these 12-minute films, mostly based on autobiographical stories about their childhoods.

And like a selection box, there are a few yucky praline noisette ones. David Baddiel's film is as annoying as he is, though it does feature a good impersonation of Record Breakers star Norris McWhirter by Alastair McGowan, who must have been delighted to get a chance to do an impression he probably last did as a child. Chris O'Dowd has a dull grumpy Santa story and Dawn French oddly casts herself as the late Queen Mother.

But there are some nice strawberry cream ones too: Victoria Wood's is a sweet, nostalgic tale, Julian Barratt's teenaged heavy metallers are quirky and Kathy Burke's memory of meeting Joe Strummer is endearing. Anyway, they're all over so quickly that even the ho-hum ones are watchable enough - shame though that for Sky, decent original programmes come barely more than once a year.

Christmas may have peaked too soon because Little Crackers (Sky1), a set of short films loosely based on the theme of childhood and featuring top comedy writer/performers, got off to a, er, cracking start with a brace of offerings from Victoria Wood and The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd.

Wood's Lancastrian meander down a dark memory lane was touching and familiar, O'Dowd brought a cheeky lump to the throat with a tale about a lad who always wanted Subbuteo yet got lumbered with a hand-me-down Barbie (with moustache).

As an idea for a Christmas series, it's right on the stocking. Kathy Burke channelling X-Ray Spex and The Clash is still to come and tonight's offering from Catherine Tate, featuring a shock-headed ginger of painful shyness who wees herself at frequent intervals is laugh-out-loud funny.

You have been warned.