Andrew Billen

Married, Single, Other is more obsessed with matrimony than even Iain Duncan Smith. ITV's new six-part comedy drama asks us to consider which is the most natural state for a grown-up - marriage, being single or living together. It is already hurtling towards the conclusion "none of the above". We refer first to Lillie and Eddie, not only because the actors Lucy Davis and Shaun Dooley make them the far most compelling characters, but because they appear to be content, and have been, so we are told several times, for 16 happily unmarried years.

The only tension in the relationship is Eddie's determination to marry Lillie, a desire that manifests itself in ludicrous romantic gestures on her birthdays, on one of which we join them. "May I refer you to the window?" asks Eddie, opening the curtain on a collage of post-it notes that spell "Will You Marry Me?" Eddie, a blameless paramedic and all round good sort, is a sentimentalist, so soppy you hardly realise that towards the end of the episode he has entered the euthanasia debate on the side of do-not-revive.

He is further goaded toward the altar by the neuroses of his 11-year-old son, who in an embellishment the writer Peter Souter should have thought better of, is a child prodigy and speaks in sitcom clever-clever. Joe (Jack Scanlon) is so anxious that his parents do the proper thing he scripts his father's proposal speeches in a scrapbook. Lillie is having none of it, not merely because she is happily in love as she is (which would have done for me) but because she works at a refuge for battered wives. By the end of last night's opener, rather than book Joe into therapy with her mate Babs, she has relented, however. In the Richard Curtis moment we all feared, she proposes to Eddie at her birthday party.

Among the guests are, of course, Babs who is married to a loser called Dickie, although you might want to abbreviate the name. Dickie, an all-night online gambler, get-rich-quick fantasist and biker, is so broadly written that Dean Lennox Kelly does well to make any sense of him at all in his performance. If only Amanda Abbington could have made us see what he sees in the dreary child shrink she plays. Meanwhile, the inveterate Lothario Clint, played by Ralf Little, has fallen for a blonde model called Abbey, played by Miranda Raison who, natch, is not a bimbo after all but well on to him. Clint: "You have only just met me" Abbey: "I have met you a thousand times before."

Where Souter and his executive producer Andy Harries are going dramatically rather than thematically with all this, I am not sure, and maybe that is a good thing. Souter has mentioned Richard Curtis's name and Andy Harries made Cold Feet, still the gold standard for this kind of post-watershed soap. The programme's titles carry the words "married", "single", "other" with boxes next to them and there is more than an element of box ticking in both the piece's premise and execution. The dialogue needs to unclench and the story needs to be given time to grow organically as the characters, one prays, deepen.

Karen's baby was born on the pub floor of the returning Shameless, delivered by the scoundrel Joe, who lovingly wrapped him in a beer mat. So he's not all mad. Frank Gallagher celebrated his 50th with a romance with a librarian (Pauline McLynn, Mrs Doyle from Father Ted) who mistook herself for Cathy from Wuthering Heights and Frank for someone worth bothering with. Seven series on, I doubted whether Shameless would be worth bothering about either, but somehow it is. I'll maintain to the end that its take on the underclass is a kind of lie, but it's a darkly funny one, like this thought from last night's beery discussion of sex after too many pregnancies: "It's like chucking a chipolata up the Mersey Tunnel." I bloody well hope not.

In its one-off revival last night as Rock & Chips, Only Fools and Horses, the BBC's over-loved hit from the Eighties and Nineties, performed a genre-bend. A broad, sentimental, Cockney sitcom became a comedy-drama of charm and subtlety that did its writer John Sullivan nothing but credit. It is possible, I concede, that as an irregular viewer I missed nuances in the original, but for most part Only Fools stays in the mind - does it not? - for the chandelier smash, Rodney and Del Boy's foggy transformation into Batman and Robin, and David Jason's perfect fall through a non-existent bar, a moment pilloried with splendid unfairness by the comedian Stewart Lee for being repeatedly voted television's funniest moment.

There was almost no physical comedy in Rock & Chips, a prequel set in 1960 (it felt earlier). Del Boy was a teenager, Rodney not yet born and their mother, Joan, not merely still alive but, in Kellie Bright's winsome portrayal, still sexy. (I'll never think of Kate Aldridge, whom she plays in The Archers, in the same way again.) The 90 minutes' broadest point was Phil Daniels's moustache, donned to complete his misjudged turn as Grandad. Joan's boss's lascivious attentions to her bosom would also count as seaside postcard humour were they not undercut by the seediness of his masturbating after each of their encounters.

Instead of big laughs we were delivered a genetic explanation for why Rodney was as he was in Only Fools: melancholy, disappointed, brighter intellectually than his half-brother Del but without his neon-glare personality. His father, an unknown quantity in the series, turned out to be a ruthless jailbird with an artistic streak called Freddie Robdal (pun), who seduced his mother right under the careless supervision of Del's idle father, Reg. Nicholas Lyndhurst who, of course, played Rodney, here played his father, Freddie, and produced a detailed performance that suggested the con's psychotic tendencies could be tamed by the right woman. It was from Freddie that Rodney must have got his brains, for Joan was so thick she did not get a single joke that Freddie pushed her way. From Joan, he clearly inherited his stoical sadness.

As the really boyish Del Boy, James Buckley conveyed during his relatively brief screen time his Oedipal feelings for his mother and an early surefootedness in business, if not in society. Joan, looking down at her new baby, predicts, not unreasonably, that Del will be rich one day. From another high rise Freddie looks down on them. She nods her head. He raises his glass in pride. His paternity has finally been acknowledged. The question posed by Rodney in the last Only Fools and Horses, did his father love his mother, has been answered. Full of astute period details, such as the family planning clinic where a room of Mrs Smiths await their pregnancy tests, and with enough good lines to get by on (a snail looks like "a bogey in a crash helmet"), Rock & Chips was better than the sequel that preceded it.

And now for Jonathan Ross's third act

Jonathan Ross will have plenty of offers after his BBC exit.

The latter (Rob Brydon) will have had the consolation of knowing that on Friday's Live at the Apollo he had triumphed. His account of a home delivery in which his wife, crouched "like a mammal", had produced a baby head from her nether region and thus briefly resembled a playing card, was the definitive childbirth routine.

Russell Brand: Skinned was the title of a well-conducted inquisition by Frank Skinner of the wild-haired comedian whose androgyny, priapism and former drug addiction has made him, it seems, no less irresistible to women. Brand prides himself on his love of words, but he is no Will Self. In one excruciating extract from a show, he insisted that an audience member's poster "KAT HEART U" needed an apostrophe. Nor is he as clever as he thinks he is. He jeered at a correspondent who, re Sachsgate, suggested that he had targeted the elderly actor because he was "Spanish", yet as an excuse said that when he made the notorious phone-call he had in his mind that it was "Manuel on the other end". The interview made it clear that Brand's current addiction is not to narcotics or even sex but to fame. In this, he is the perfect comic for our celebrity-greedy age.

"It's like the break-up of the Beatles during the fall of the Roman Empire while Jordan's getting dumped by that bloke," said Malcolm Tucker of the atmosphere in a Downing Street much like our own. In this third series of The Thick Of It, the wizard of spin is not only losing his marbles - they were dislodged years ago - but his magical power to terrify. In an eerily controlled monologue he told Terri, the civil servant whose main ambition is to get home by 6, that he was an ex-pharaoh floundering in a Nile of s***: "But I am going to fashion a paddle out of that s***." I loved the delicacy of that verb "fashion". As Tucker, Peter Capaldi should get an OBE.

Real risk stalks Cast Offs, Channel 4's magnificent attempt to desentimentalise disability through a drama that places six "differently abled" young people in a fictional reality show in which they must survive for three months on a British island (not Barry). Is it going to be in bad taste, incredible, patronising, wince-making?

The greatest risk may be that, having refused to make its cast heroes, the writers may have made them too unlikeable to care about. Tuesday's opener concentrated on Dan, a sporty young man left paraplegic by a car accident, who is much less prepared than those around him, such as his father and his mates on the wheelchair basketball team, to locate the funny side (to what, exactly?). As Dan, Peter Mitchell produced, however, a performance that was deeply sympathetic. The flashback in which he brought a girl back to his parents' home from the pub - his father silently egged him on from the room next door - was as agonising as the date scene in Mike Leigh's Bleak Moments. Cast Offs has its faults, such as that not enough care has been taken with the reality show element, but it is doing most of what it attempts very well. The only offence caused is that, having taken so many creative risks, Channel 4 has not risked showing it before 11pm.

In Mouth to Mouth an Essex-girl called Meeshell recounted dumping her best friend and her boyfriend to try to win a version of The X Factor. The level of humour of this illustrated monologue can be judged from the phonetic spelling of her name, by lines such as "I'm not age-a-list, I just don't want to smell piss when I sing" and by the writer Karl Minns' belief that spastic colons and testicular cancer are of themselves funny. His one-liners kept on coming, unfortunately. No sooner was her unbelievable whine over than we heard the story again from Meeshell's cynical ex-boyfriend Tyler in the second part of the double bill. Anna Nightingale as Meeshell and Alex Price as Tyler produced the sorts of trying-too-hard performances normally inflicted only on audition reels. Sadly, it will be a while before Minns is hailed as the next Alan Bennett.

On her new sitcom Miranda, Miranda Hart has set herself the difficult job of making an irritating and socially awkward character watchable. She worked hard last night by sub-vocalising her thoughts, talking to camera, showing us fantasy sequences and doing more pratfalls than Lucille Ball. She's funny.

Yet a series based on a young woman's ugliness worries me and so does one predicated on the idea that she must marry. I suppose it is progress that the tall, goofy Hart gets to star at all. In the good old, bad old days, she would be writing for her attractive co-star Sally Phillips. But she, oddly, is currently a radio star.