Andrew Billen

Another mystery: how has the BBC managed to turn one of the nation's most original comedians into the front man for a deadly conventional stand-up'n'sketch show? Even the title of The Omid Djalili Show suggests creative weariness and his patter certainly does. There should be real edge to an Iranian making jokes about Muslims, but there isn't when the jokes about what, with careful vagueness, he calls "the Middle East" feature a comedian called Jimmy Carr Bomb ("He took the roof off") and a local branch of the Samaritans that "we call a recruiting centre" (for suicide bombers). Congratulating himself on this last gag, he told us: "That's so wrong but so funny." It was neither, and, anyhow, I was taught it was impolite to remark on your own jokes.

To be polite myself, a couple of sketches showed flickers of life. Sheikhs and the City was a rather neat parody ("Was sex about oil wells or being well-oiled?") and one about a recycling dump with a special slot for Richard Littlejohn articles, adverts for sheds and free DVDs attached to newspapers raised a smile. His Tudors parody which owed more to Armstrong and Miller's jive-talking RAF pilots than the series didn't. "I'm tired of this s***," quoth a Bronx-speaking King Henry. So was I, sire.

Daringly or negligently, BBC Two may have upset Eastering Christians last night by transmitting Stewart Lee's anti-religion stand-up set last night. Benedict XVIII got it in the neck and so did John Paul II, or, at least, his marketing man did for selling lollipops bearing his features in Vatican Square. The Muslims were hardly more than a passing reference, however, and Lee got distracted by David Cameron, Laurel and Hardy and a postmodernist reading of his own act. The sketches were awful. His routine about the evangelist who turned up at his door with the poser "If Jesus is the answer what is the question?" (reply: "Is it, 'For which role was Robert Powell nominated for a Bafta?'") was brilliant. As it was 20 years ago, when Lee first performed it.

Editor Note: This review was published in The Times despite the fact the religion episode had actually been moved to the following week and thus had not been broadcast yet

Brave Young Men starred Tom Basden as the sidekick of a school caretaker who is told by a time-travelling civil servant that he has become "Caretaker of the World, Brighton and Hove Division". It is billed as a comic take on the sci-fi series Quantum Leap - a quantum leap backwards, I fear. As Professor Deering would sneer, one to file under whimsy.

On his Comedy Vehicle Stewart Lee drove a cross between a tractor and the field it was ploughing into the debate that should start now about the purpose of BBC Two. After the silliest opening titles Lee could dream up, in which his tractor-field was followed by a troupe of circus performers, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle provided the most intelligent half hour of stand-up you will see on television this year - outside, one trusts, the next five episodes of this series.

"The sat-nav is off," promised Lee at the start of his set, and for once the promise of unpredictability was not broken.

Lee, who has not had his own TV series since the juvenilia that was Fist of Fun, demonstrated that in the intervening years he has become the master of deadpan stand-up. A routine in which he repeatedly tried to explain who rappers were was almost surreally brilliant. But that is not the reason Lee's show was important: it suggested that intelligence might be valued again on BBC Two, after some decades in which intellectual snobbery was considered almost as vile as racism.

Review in The Times

Corden and Horne may have won our hearts with subtle performances in Gavin & Stacey, the sitcom on which they met, but subtlety is not their strength here.

The old guys in The Old Guys are engaged in a sedate but still desperate competition to appear less old than they are, and, specifically, less old than each other. In the first of this new sitcom, the pair institute a competition to prove which has the stronger bladder. Caught short at their neighbour Sally's party, Tom and Roy end up peeing in her kitchen sink. Fortunately they get away with this and no one notices. Oh, no they don't! Sally discovers them mid-leak. Reaction shot. Cue music, applause and credits.

I was hoping for a little more from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the creators of the blissful Peep Show. But although their subject is age, this is a piece of juvenilia, brought to the screen many years after its first drafts. Happily for us, but sadly for the show, comedy has moved on in the meantime. Thanks to Peep Show, among other programmes, it is now twice as hard to make work a multicamera, two-set sitcom, videoed in front of a live audience. Thanks also to Peep Show, we expect comedy characterisation to go deeper than tired divisions between tidy and slobby, introvert and extrovert. At the moment, the best ways to read nuance into the pair is to imagine that Tom, played as a decayed but still snobbish student by Roger Lloyd Pack, is an older version of Peep Show's Jeremy. That would make Clive Swift's Roy, for whom a cravat is never out of the question, Mark.

It is, I confess, hard to imagine the Trainspotting novelist Irvine Welsh thriving at Cambridge but his absence from it might, you would think, be a boon when making a 'mockumentary' about the white working classes. Yet Good Arrows, which purportedly followed the decline of a former Welsh darts champion, was nasty and dreary. If the traditional sitcom is hard to make work so, post The Office and Borat, is the cod doc. When the best you can come up is inventing a drug fermented from faeces and urine and your lead actress apparently bases her performance on Nessa from Gavin and Stacey you cannot be surprised when ITV4 transmits its first original comedy commission at 11pm on a Saturday night.

Stanley Baxter addresses a loyal nation

The comedian has been booted off TV twice but now he's back at Christmas in regal style.

The Times Review

It is cleverer than it seems and, while the easy criticism of comedy dramas is that they are neither one thing nor the other, nor, you could say, is life. This squirrel is not charmed yet but will keep watching, not least because Sunshine, like a comical version of Jimmy McGovern's The Street, deals with something approximating life as it is lived beyond the M25.

Everything 'fell apart' for John Lloyd, the TV producer, when he had a midlife crisis. Out of it came a new vision of life and the TV show QI.