Outnumbered

"Why is your face grey?" says Ben to his father, first thing in the morning, capturing the horror every parent experiences when faced with the combination of a child and a raging hangover. From then on all the best lines go to the borderline psychopathic nine-year-old, including the classic "What's the point of living?" This week the story revolves around trying to get the house in order before some prospective buyers come round . . . not easy when there is a pigeon wreaking havoc in the kitchen.

TV matters: Outnumbered

It can be tricky when fictional television characters watch TV, but Outnumbered manages to make it both believable and funny.

Once again Outnumbered provides half an hour of pure happiness. The episode begins with the two brothers at loggerheads. The younger one, Ben (Daniel Roche), has changed his brother's status on Facebook to "Jake is a transvestite", so Jake (Tyger Drew-Henry) responded by changing Ben's Facebook status to "Ben died on Tuesday". Meanwhile Dad (Hugh Dennis) struggles to explain to the children what a colonoscopy is ("Will we be able to watch it live on television?"), while Mum (Claire Skinner) makes a doomed attempt to try and explain to her 13-year-old son what is meant by the objectification of women. It's consistently funny, but best of all is the adult tennis match featuring Ben as a ball-boy and seven-year-old Karen (Ramona Marquez) as the referee.

There's a battle between the sexes raging, sparked by Karen's ambition to be an astronaut. Her tiny sexist brother, Ben, dismisses this out of hand on the grounds that "girls can't throw". This makes sense to him, even if it baffles everyone else. But the pair move on to safer territory when Pete lets slip that he has a hospital appointment for a colonoscopy. Karen is remorseless about how anything can photograph her dad's insides until Pete is forced to reveal the truth. Cue much speculation about "midget doctors". It's another painfully funny episode that's packed with zinging lines from the kids and acute observations about the tiny pitfalls of a generally happy suburban family life - like not writing engagements on the calendar, and how to deal with a pompous windbag neighbour (a great cameo from The Thick of It's Alex Macqueen).

Though it's perhaps not tickling quite as many funny bones as it once did, the semi-improvised sitcom is still compulsive viewing.

Having recently endured a colonoscopy in real life, Hugh Dennis must have thought he'd heard all possible jokes about bums and cameras. But Ramona and Ben dream up some more tonight when his character Pete is due to have the same procedure.

Tonight's theme - if this collection of non-sequiturs can claim a theme - is Why It's Wrong To Treat Women As Sex Objects Or Domestic Servants. But there's more comedy in the bit with Ramona re-enacting The Apprentice with her stuffed toys.

Speaking of TV, Jake and his dad have very different tastes as Pete moans about Making Of... shows. "TV shows are like pork pies," moans Pete. "They're fantastic but you don't want to know what goes in them." Which might explain why he now needs to have a camera shoved up his insides.

Passion is a word that's bandied about a lot on reality TV programmes. But I've never seen anyone so tirelessly dedicated to putting that passion into action as I have in this show.

I saw Hugh Dennis once, carrying an enormous backpack and walking down Regent Street a few days before Christmas. Actually, I had to check to see if there were cameras following him, so much like his Outnumbered character, flustered dad-of-three Pete, did he appear. I think he caught my gawping, because he pulled that face he does on Mock the Week - lip curled, eyebrow up, face deadpan - so I looked away. Still don't know if there were cameras.

I get the impression this happens a lot. Because, after all, Outnumbered is a lot like real life. It's not the script that does it - that's good, though, like any of these two point four children sitcoms, a little cheesy too. No, it's the children. They don't seem to be acting at all. Take last night, when they thought they'd won half a million pounds from Reader's Digest. "We can buy school and close it down!" yelled Ben. "We could save the polar bears!" yelled Karen. On and on they went with their shopping list. Were they making it up as they went along? That's what it looked like. It's a little frightening, really. Children, I mean. They're monstrous, aren't they? Monstrous but also quite funny, especially for those of us who don't have them for real. It's a form of war tourism: look how Karen makes her granny squirm with her questions about weight! Isn't it awful? Thank god I don't have one. Phew.

One of the boys has been downloading "inappropriate" images of their teacher, which leads to an awkward family discussion about the meaning of inappropriate. But Dad (Hugh Dennis) tries not to worry. "They're just teenage boys," he tells his wife (Claire Skinner). "They're like baboons on heat. In school uniforms." Elsewhere in the house, five-year-old Karen (Ramona Marquez) is busy writing letters to President Obama. "I am beginning to lose my patience . . ." she begins. She is also developing a tough-love approach to prison reform. Prisoners, she says, should be put in holes in the ground. Occasionally soup should be poured in, forcing them to scoop it up in their hands. The trouble with children is that they don't appreciate the value of political correctness.

Another terrific episode. We're used to the way Karen's button nose and ringlets hide a lethal gift: she runs rings around adults for fun. Given half an opening, she sniffs out the hypocrisies of the grown-up world like a bloodhound. This week it's her grandmother who gets the treatment as they discuss being fat. "A woman can be any size or shape she wants," Gran reassures her. Karen ponders this. "What about..." she replies, "a hexagon?" Just as well worked is the bit where she plays with her cuddly toys, acting out Britain's Got Talent. ("I'm going to eat all the chocolate I can eat in memory of my mother," says plush Hippo.) Basically, any scene she's in is funny. As are all the other scenes, in fact. Look out for Ben's Darth Vader impression.

Outnumbered leaves the joke on parents everywhere

The Brockman family are successful, even smug, living in a nice neighbourhood in London, with a nice, safe job (teaching history), with three smart, super-cute kids. On the surface, it's all nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Now in its third series, some of this has become cloying.