The Peter Serafinowicz Show

The Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special was surprisingly good fun, given the fact I disliked the original sketch show when it aired earlier last year. The quality control was definitely higher (although the next-day midnight extended repeat reinserted a lot of grot) and I was glad it didn't just put a festive spin on old sketches. A good 85% of it was new stuff - and I'm still giggling at the intimidating estate agent ('did I arks you?') and the insane job interview ('you passed the test!') Let's hope a second series builds on this upswing in quality.

Peter's BBC2 sketch series was a mite disappointing, but there was not much wrong with this inventive Christmas special. The material in this new special seemed to have sieved out the weaknesses which were allowed into the series.

Smooth-voiced comedy wizard Peter Serafinowicz first cast a spell on us in the excellent and under-appreciated Tomorrow's World spoof Look Around You. But he's more than capable of carrying proceedings on his own, as this festive outing of his immersive sketch show proves. Inept inventor/salesman Brian Butterfield, here hawking his 'Christmas pizza', is a delight as ever, and impressions of Terry Wogan and David Attenborough veer dangerously close to genius.

A festive episode of a wildly underrated sketch show. Serafinowicz is a versatile actor and a terrifyingly good mimic, but the left-field TV parodies of his 2007 series were perhaps too weird for mass consumption: this is brighter, faster and straighter. There's the odd regrettably unsubtle lampoon (eg Terry Wogan as a hash fiend), but there's also a successful move into traditional sketches, plus joyously imaginative send-ups of Apple adverts and Planet Earth, and fan favourites such as enormous salesman Brian Butterfield, here hawking his comprehensive Christmas pizza. It's a torrent of kooky silliness, textured by Serafinowicz's powerful and slightly scary screen presence. When he's on form - as he often is here - he looks like a star in waiting.

Apart from a pronounceable surname, Mr Serafinowicz has it all, really - a great career as a comic actor, writer, composer and a lovely wife in fellow funny thesp Sarah Alexander off Green Wing and Mutual Friends. Now he's also got a Christmas edition of his own sketch series, and he'll be spoofing TV shows, shopping channels and Hollywood news bulletins and generally larking about. And jolly good for him.

A welcome return for this brilliant, imposing performer, whose debut sketch show was let down by some abstruse material. This time we're promised something more conventional, which - for once - is welcome news.

Some people say this sketch show is massively underrated, some say it's just rubbish, which probably means it falls somewhere in the middle, like the vast majority of sketch comedy. Slightly kooky, Serafinowicz's brand of humour is vulnerable to falling flat on its face for being slightly too out there, but in a world where somebody commissioned the dire The Kevin Bishop Show, I'll take this any day.

A comedy giant in the making?

After years as the best-connected man in British comedy, this 6ft 5in Liverpudlian has his own BBC show, launched straight from YouTube on to primetime TV, but can his surreal humour now survive the mainstream?

From Spaced to Black Books to the very deeply brilliant Look Around You, P.S. (it's just easier on the RSI, frankly) invariably makes me laugh, as did his new sketch show, commissioned on the back of an amusing spoof showbiz news clip circulated on the interwebnet, and which was in every conceivable way the perfect giggly antidote to three hours of Murphy's Law.

P.S. is a brilliant impressionist, too - his uncanny Chris Tarrant, host of the absurd quiz show 'Heads or Tails', was only undermined by the premise not being nearly as absurd as it appears. Serafinowicz may not be aware of the deliciously unsophisticated Australian gambling game 2-Up, which makes craps look like poker, but I suspect he may want to investigate.

TV Scoop Review

This one I really *wanted* to be good. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. While there were some laughs to be had, it has to be admitted that it was bit of a let down.