Andrew Billen

It has been a long march for The League Of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith since their original (very original) TV series in 1999. With each subsequent venture they have scrambled farther over the top. Inside No. 9, a series of one-off plays each taking place at a different address starting with 9, represents a retreat to firmer ground.

Last night's debut was much less fantastical than their last series Psychoville, free of prosthetics and cross-dressing. It dealt, as per, with incest and abuse, but in the manner that Alan Ayckbourn might. The Greek ruled that plays should take place over a single day in a single place. Sardines occurred over half an hour in a single wardrobe. It occupied a wall in an outsized family house, the scene of uptight daughter Rebecca's engagement party. Childhood momentum had propelled her and brother Carl (Pemberton), a man barely out of the closet and about to enter a wardrobe, into a game of sardines that no one wanted to play.

Katherine Parkinson's Rebecca was a superb study in congenital dissatisfaction, about to marry a man whose previous lover is not only still on his mind but in the wardrobe. The whole party ends up in there, including the dull, quiet one (beware the dull, quiet ones, they are usually the writers' surrogates). It is Carl, though, who outs the elephant in the wardrobe, a sexual assault on a child by his bullying father: "I was teaching the boy how to wash himself!" responds the father.

Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Anna Chancellor must have so enjoyed getting dialogue in which each sentence was minutely crafted for them. My favourite line may even have come from Timothy West as the patriarch complaining at a transgressing of sardine rules: "This isn't hide-and-go-seek". Was that posh for "hide and seek" or a unique verbal corruption?

Sardines was a disciplined comedy, but a little bit of discipline, as one of the League's perverts might say, never did anyone any harm. Save for the Tales of the Unexpected twist, I loved it.

There was really only one punchline possible for the finale of the hermetic tragi-comedy Roger & Val Have Just Got In: someone other than Roger and Val (Alfred Molina & Dawn French) had to enter the house. I did not foresee, however, the impact on the emotional solar-plexus of the show's final, moving, wonderful moments as the couple's front door let in the light. If it had not been clear before, all the eating, infantile squabbling and acting out (Roger last night staged a Wendy House sit-in) can now be seen as grieving for their infant son. Last night, the mourning ended. Tremendous TV.

One Foot In The Grave had a suppressed secret, mentioned only once, that the Meldrews had a child who had died. There is less reticence in Roger & Val Have Just Got In - the sitcom's second series began with a resume which included Roger's tragic observation that he had been a father for "five and a half weeks."

The bereavement is not something they like to discuss much but it does answer the question of why, like so many sitcom couples, they are childless and... we can see with its protagonists obsession with trivia as a form of displacement. It certainly, I felt, informed last night's references to the 'bleakness' of their home, a bleakness that could be offset only by packing away their baggage (Roger & Val had just returned from a wedding) and turning off the overhead lights in favour of kinder lighting.

Emma and Beth Kilcoyne's writing contains wonderful lines that captures the pair's more or less comfortable isolation. Val, looking at The Observer, complained that it was like "15 other people coming into the house all jabbering for my attention." They are all delivered perfectly. Not many people other than Alfred Molina could say, "Rolf Harris doing what he does very well" without sounding idiotic. He is superb, but Dawn French's is the riskier performance. When he gently mocks her hopes of becoming a Deputy Headmistress by citing Bob Marley's I Shot The Sheriff (but I did not shoot the Deputy) she responds by shouting Come On Eileen so aggressively it takes a second to realise she is singing. My only criticism concerns the box-on-Val's-head gags that play to the gallery. There is no gallery. This is BBC Two.

I'm reviewing Mongrels because it is the most radical take on furry animals since The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Its twin jokes are to imbue animals with the worst rather than most charming human attributes and, second, to challenge the convention that puppets are fit only for children. Mongrels, which began an eight-part post-watershed run last night, is the dirtiest puppet show since Zippy made a foreskin joke on an in-house Christmas edition of Rainbow.

Actually, Nelson, the fox, was one of the gentler beasts among the creator Adam Miller's dark menagerie. A lonely Boggle cheat, he was a gentle soul whose greatest crime, initially, was to pretend on a dating site that he was Toby Anstis (a former star of CBBC, you know). But then his date, Wendy, lied too. For one thing she was a chicken. For another she was married - she claimed to a "wife-pecker" who abused her so badly that she mislaid. "It was," she said, "like giving birth to an omelette." Intimacy becomes an issue for these DNA-crossed lovers. When a fox and a chicken kiss it looks like the fox is having supper. In the end, tiring of her lies, Nelson cuts off Wendy's head with a plastic knife in an inner-city Mississippi Fried Chicken restaurant.

Nelson is still nicer than the bitchy Afghan bitch Destiny who at a Strictly Dog Dancing session with her widowed owner remarks that most people have to fly a plane into a skyscraper before they are surrounded by this many virgins. Meanwhile, Marion the cat is well on the way to becoming a serial murderer of old ladies. Harold Shipman got a mention, as did Anne Frank. Mary Whitehouse once complained about an episode of Pinky and Perky. She would have had a field day with this. Best taken with a couple of pints of lager, Mongrels is a hit even if you're sober. Surely, though, it should be called Creature Discomforts.

Last Night's TV: Outnumbered

Some feel that the charm of Outnumbered is fading as the children get older and more knowing. I disagree, but it is interesting to see the older boy, sarcy Jake (played by Tyger Drew-Honey, poor chap) subside into adolescent taciturnity.

Yes, Prime Minister: greatest comeback since Lib-Dems

Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey have returned. Why? One of the writers who created them explains.

The improvised life of Paul Merton

Despite depression and his wife's death, he remains our best off-the-cuff comic. He talks about finding happiness again.

My reviewer's DVD of the first of Channel 4's enterprising Comedy Roast was incomplete. It lacked a title sequence and, at the end, a caption read "CRAWLER CREDITS". But there were no crawlers to credit. Perhaps for the first time on British television the showbiz mafia came not to praise but to bury one of its godfathers. Still, as with the best man's speech, the tone is hard to get right. On The Larry Sanders Show the fictional chat show host was rendered suicidal by his friends' merciless "tributes". You don't want that. But you do want some of the barbs to hurt.

Bruce Forsyth's age was a subject of jokes back in his 1970s heyday and, even though, at 82, they are rather more acute now, they are still more affectionate than cruel. Jimmy Carr, the show's MC, led the way with them - Brucie was the first in his community to walk upright and use tools etc - but it was Jonathan Ross who took on Forsyth's real vulnerability: his marital record. Doing a passable Brucie impression, Ross mimicked him saying "I've told my wife we are working late, so we have ten minutes for a quickie, Anthea." Anthea Redfern, The Generation Game's lovely hostess, was to become, younger viewers may not know, the second, but not last, Mrs F.

He was not thanked for his efforts, even though Wilnelia Forsyth, herself, pointedly mentioned her husband's three wives. It was a deadly reminder of how lonely it is when you fall from favour as Ross, following the Andrew Sachs debacle, clearly has. Sean Lock was surprised Ross had turned up in person "because normally if you want to insult an elderly national treasure, you do it on the phone". That was good but it was Forsyth himself who did most damage. Eric Morecambe would have ripped into Ross ("I am sure he would," said Ross glumly). Ross was "all washed up and not even 50"£. The Ross-hating press has been accused of hyping Forsyth's attack but I think Ross had got to him, and for that he should be congratulated. A well-concealed side of Forsyth was briefly exposed.

And difference was the secret of a wonderful weekend of popular drama on BBC One. Jonathan Creek remains indefinably cross-genre. It is a mystery series without detectives, an X-Files saga for sceptics. It is a comedy that can scare you rigid. At its centre is a romance that never happens. I don't know how long it takes David Renwick to devise his meticulous Creek plots but in last night's not a line was wasted. Even the ones apparently there just to be funny had hidden purpose. "They think there might be an early malignancy knocking about there somewhere," said Ian McNeice's hypochondriac priest of his ample body. But he really was ill - although he performed a little resurrection from the pulpit at the end.

The episode was called The Judas Tree and its plot would not have worked without its Bible references or its Roman Catholic dramatis personae. Yet only a very solemn Christian would object to its showing on Easter Day. In any case, from the moment of Creek's first party trick - divining from his maligned sidekick Joey's appearance exactly what she had been doing that day - this was, more than anything, a Sherlock Holmes story.

Lizzie and Sarah was a Stygian comedy about the lives of sexless middle-aged women written and performed by Julia Davis and Jessica Hynes. Its broadcast reminded me of the line that the late great editor of the Sunday Express, John Junor, used on his writers: "Laddie, your piece is excellent - and if I were to publish it I would not change a word." BBC Two did not spike Lizzie and Sarah but it did put it out at 11.45pm on Saturday night. It was certainly strong stuff. (Sample line: "Oh, John loves big boobs. He always says I was two soggy old socks pre-children and with all the breast feeding and wotnot he just tells people I had a double mastectomy.") But Davis and Hynes, who cleverly also played two vacuous teenage girls whom their husbands do deign to lust over, were superb. The build up to a Thelma & Louise climax was fuelled by a high-octane anger. Henry Normal of Baby Cow who made the pilot tells me that he has not lost hope of its becoming a series. He'll be lucky. By Friday the BBC had not even confirmed it would be on iPlayer. If you missed it - and you probably did - you can, however, download it on iTunes.